Blindsided

Modern management science seeks to streamline and rationalise the business process; to base decision-making on proven facts and to eliminate risk and uncertainty.  Unfortunately, businesses are run by human beings and depend on other human beings for their custom. Human beings, it seems safe to say, are irredeemably selfish, greedy, short-sighted and prone to mass delusion. Time and again throughout history, business and society have been blindsided by people’s irrational and unpredictable behaviour. And it’s not just the consumers: well-respected business executives and their advisors get swept up with euphoria and panic along with the rest of us; they succumb to greed; they fail to plan for likely crises (and sometimes even for inevitable ones). Blindsided looks at the history of such outbreaks of irrational behaviour, at the occurrence of unpredictable but likely events, such as global pandemics and collapses of law and order, and at changes that have caught forecasters by surprise, such as the ageing and declining population of some affluent modern societies. This fascinating book reminds the world of business that it needs to plan for the unexpected, and to realise that neither its consumers nor even its own executives must be expected to act with cool rationality at all times.


JONATHAN GIFFORD is a business man, historian and author, whose writing focuses particularly on the human aspects of leadership and management. After reading philosophy at the University of Kent at Canterbury, Jonathan worked for a number of major media organizations, beginning his career at the Guardian newspaper in the 1970s. He went on to work for the Sunday Express, the Mail on Sunday, and later for BBC Worldwide, where he launched the award-winning BBC History Magazine in 2000. Jonathan now runs his own company, Gifford Creative, and is a director of the marketing consultancy Bluequest Media. He lives in Oxfordshire with his wife and children.