The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage

Written by Daniel Burrus

Narrated by Daniel Burrus

Technology-driven change is accelerating at an exponential rate, but moving fast in the wrong direction will only get you into trouble faster! Reacting to problems and digital disruptions, no matter how agile you and your organization are, is no longer good enough.

The Anticipatory Organization teaches you how to separate the Hard Trends that will happen, from the Soft Trends that might happen, allowing you to jump ahead with low risk and the confidence certainty can provide. Accelerate innovation and actively shape the future—before someone else does it for you!

Digital transformation has divided us all into two camps: the disruptor and the disrupted. The Anticipatory Organization gives you the tools you need to see disruption before it happens, allowing you to turn change into advantage. In The Anticipatory Organization, Burrus shows us that the future is far more certain than we realize, and finding certainty in an uncertain world provides a big advantage for those who know how and where to look for it.

Inspired by the dramatic results that organizations are experiencing from his award-winning learning system, The Anticipatory Organization offers a comprehensive way to identify game-changing opportunities. Using the principles of this proven model, you will learn how to elevate planning, accelerate innovation, and transform results by pinpointing and acting upon enormous opportunities waiting to be discovered.

Readers will learn how to:

• Separate the Hard Trends that will happen from the Soft Trends that might happen
• Anticipate disruptions, problems, and game-changing opportunities
• Identify and pre-solve predictable problems
• Accelerate innovation (both everyday innovation and exponential innovation)
• Pinpoint and act upon enormous untapped opportunities
• Skip problems and barriers to succeed faster

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
• Release date: Oct 10, 2017
• ISBN: 9781626347977

Daniel Burrus

Daniel Burrus serves as a strategic adviser to executives from a wide range of Fortune 500 firms, helping them discover invisible opportunities and solve impossible problems. His client list includes Microsoft, Kaiser Permanente, Toshiba, GE, Procter & Gamble, American Express, Kellogg, Ernst & Young, Disney, and IBM. He has founded and managed six successful companies and has been the keynote speaker to more than 2,400 audiences worldwide. His highly acclaimed book Technotrends has been translated into more than a dozen languages.

Reviews for The Anticipatory Organization

[pdcread · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Change in the modern world seems to be happening faster each year. We have had Moore’s Law which predicted the rate of change in computing power and speed, and with the increase in processing power in smartphones, the modern office is in your pocket now. Emails fire at you all hours of the day, instant messaging software is constantly chirping and your notifications from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are getting silly. In amongst all these distractions, there are big changes happening in the world and if you miss them as a business then you are definitely going to be up the creek without a paddle.

In The Anticipatory Organization, Daniel Burrus teaches us to separate what he calls Hard Trends, things that are almost certainly going to happen and cannot avoid, such as regulation technological advancement, climate change, from Soft Trends, which are events that might happen but on the other hand might not. Understanding the difference between them and comprehending the impact on your business is critical. It enables you to expect the unexpected and turn change into a business advantage. There are a two other concepts that he introduces, one of which is quite revolutionary, which is to actually skip a problem, and come back to it at a point later in time; mad as it may sound, it often means that the problem that seemed huge and urgent at the time when looked at later is much less of an issue. The other concept is Futureview; as Burrus' states, you cannot shape your future whilst still looking at your past achievements, instead you need to be looking at technologies and products that disrupt and innovate to be able to make your business a success tomorrow and beyond.

Overall an interesting book on a new way of looking at ways of changing businesses by properly analysing the trends going on in the world and exploiting the gaps that other businesses have missed.