For leaders and change agents who are too busy inventing their future to read about it in these books, here are a few glimpses of what lies ahead (and some ideas about how to get there).
What do you want to be when you grow up?
Watts Wacker and his colleagues say that Steven Spielberg, Jasper Johns, and John Elway have one major thing in common: From a very young age, they all knew what they wanted to do as adults. As a result, they "could imagine themselves so clearly in the future and thus make their futures live in the present [that] they all also rearranged their realities to fit where they wanted to go. Failure was never failure for them; it was just another step on the road to success."
Where do you want to go tomorrow?
One reason why big companies have trouble creating their future is that they don't know where they want to go. Consider the case of Kodak. Although the company's mission is to increase both the use of images in general and the relevance of images in people's daily lives, you have to read 40% of Kodak's 140-word mission statement before you come across the word "image." Write Wacker and his colleagues: "Fail to say what your real mission must be, and you in effect deny what gives the company meaning to those who work for it."
The new new things
Some scientists who study complexity call that phenomenon the "edge of chaos," a term that is not likely to endear them to businesspeople. But Lewin and Regine describe it in less alarming terms. Complexity, they argue, is the point at which an organization "will experience perpetual novelty [and] constant surprise as new patterns of behavior ceaselessly emerge."
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