Future Business

In The Scrum Fieldbook, he draws on his firm’s extensive experience in the field to take leaders, managers, and employees deeper into the specific challenges and new opportunities organizations face in an Agile transformation. He shows how the Scrum framework can be successfully applied to any project in any industry, from automobile manufacturers in the US and Europe to nonprofits in Africa, from home renovation contractors in Minnesota to gas exploration companies in South America, from fighter plane builders in Sweden to US Navy Special Forces teams.

“Kill it with fire”, the typical first reaction to a legacy system falling into obsolescence, is a knee-jerk approach that often burns through tons of money and time only to result in a less efficient solution. This book offers a far more forgiving modernization framework, laying out smart value-add strategies and proven incremental techniques that work equally well for ancient systems and brand-new ones.

Pouring yourself into a single full-time job is the riskiest move you can make. Your parents’ advice to focus on one career path? It doesn’t work anymore, for reasons ranging from recessions to student loan debt, the gig economy, climate disasters, and a global pandemic (to name a few). We need a dramatically different relationship with work, one that allows us to define ourselves beyond our paid labor. The answer? A Portfolio Life.

Our future is written by hopes, fears, dreams, expectations, and decisions made about life. In the same way, organizations have futures written by history, circumstances, culture, aspirations, successes, and failures. These already-written futures determine and shape the level of performance that's possible for individuals and organizations. Authors Steve Zaffron and Dave Logan crack the code on rewriting the future for people and organizations, elevating performance to unprecedented levels.

New edition, expanded and updated. With the release of Theory U almost 10 years ago, Otto Scharmer set in motion a revolution in thought. Scharmer explained that what we pay attention to and how we pay attention is key to what we create. What prevents us from attending to situations more effectively is that we aren't fully aware of and in touch with the inner place from which attention and intention originate.

The New York Times best-selling author heralds the future of business in Free. In his revolutionary best seller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free, he makes the compelling case that, in many instances, businesses can profit more from giving things away than they can by charging for them.

Learn from the past. Understand the present. Explore the future.

National leader Stacey Abrams has written the guide to harnessing the strengths of being an outsider and succeeding anyway. Leadership is hard. Convincing others - and yourself - that you are capable of taking charge and achieving more requires insight and courage. Lead from the Outside is the handbook for outsiders, written with an eye toward the challenges that hinder women, people of color, the working class, members of the LGBTQ community, and millennials ready to make change.

First identified by journalist Jeff Howe in a June 2006 Wired article, “crowdsourcing” describes the process by which the power of the many can be leveraged to accomplish feats that were once the province of the specialized few. Howe reveals that the crowd is more than wise - it’s talented, creative, and stunningly productive. Crowdsourcing activates the transformative power of today’s technology, liberating the latent potential within us all. It’s a perfect meritocracy, where age, gender, race, education, and job history no longer matter.

Character is something intrinsic to us all; it forms and reveals who we are. Unbeknownst to many, character is foundational to our judgment, behavior, and leadership. As we tackle the grand challenges of our time, strength of character guides us to make better decisions, creates greater well-being, and contributes to human flourishing. For those who lead—whether in the public, private, not for profit, or education sectors—a greater understanding of character will challenge your thinking, inspire new ideas, and elevate your personal and professional performance.

Two decades into the twenty-first century, the stagnation of living standards has become the defining trend of American life. Life expectancy has declined, economic inequality has soared, and, after some progress, the Black-white wage gap is once again as large as it was in the 1950s. How did this happen in the world’s most powerful country? And what happened to the “American dream”—the promise of a happier, healthier, more prosperous future—which was once such an inextricable part of our national identity?

Staying true to his trademark journalistic approach, Andrés Oppenheimer takes his listeners on yet another journey, this time across the globe, in a thought-provoking search to understand what the future holds for today's jobs in the foreseeable age of automation.

For years, consumers have been promised a simple, carefree digital future. We could live, work, learn, and play from the comforts of our homes, and have whatever we desire brought to our door with the flick of a finger. Instant communication would bring us together. Technological convenience would give us more time to focus on what really mattered. When the pandemic hit, that future transformed into the present, almost overnight. And the reviews aren't great.

In recent years, workplace toxicity, industry volatility, and technology-driven turnover have threatened the psychological well-being of employees. When we can’t flourish at work, both personal success and corporate productivity suffer. As we sit on the cusp of some of the most turbulent economic changes in history, many of us wonder how we can not only survive but flourish in our careers. Now, Tomorrowmind provides essential plans and actionable advice for facing the uncertain future of work.

For thousands of years, customers have been individual humans, families or organizations. But soon, generative AI enabled software and hardware machines will start to act as customers. First they will shop for us, later they will act for themselves. You can’t take them to dinner, and they won’t fall for your slogans, but they might help grow your market – if you know how. Companies are already being called on the phone by software that sounds like a person. Cars will buy their own fuel and tires. That smart speaker in every home can become the housekeeper and shopper for the family it serves.

The way we currently do business is undermining the environment, our mental health, and our future as a species. Gadfly has a dream: to change the world, together. We have worked as board-level advisors to some of the biggest companies in the world, and are offering our experience of leading large scale change, so that you can create change in your own spheres of influence.

The renowned global thought leader and Google’s first Chief Innovation Evangelist introduces a forward-thinking mindstate that will help you navigate ambiguity and uncertainty with intention, transform problems and challenges into profound opportunities, and create exactly the future you want to see.

We experience change in four phases. The first is panic. Then we adapt. Then we find a new normal. And then, finally, we reach the phase we could not have imagined in the beginning, the moment when we realize that we wouldn’t go back. Build for Tomorrow is designed to accelerate that process—to help you lessen your panic, adapt faster, define the new normal, and thrive going forward. And it arrives as we all, in some way, have felt a shift in our lives.

In Success from the Inside Out, corporate executive, entrepreneur, and preacher Nona Jones takes us on a personal journey to discovering the difference between success and good success so that we can experience God's power to deliver us from even the deepest pain.

Leaders already know that the classic approach to strategy - analyze, plan, execute - is losing relevance. But they don't yet know what replaces it. As everyone and everything becomes more interconnected and digitized, how do you operate, compete, and win? Ming Zeng, the former chief of staff and strategy adviser to Alibaba Group's founder, Jack Ma, explains how the latest technological developments, such as artificial intelligence, machine learning, the mobile internet, and cloud computing, are redefining how value is created.