Daniel Burrus is considered one of the world’s leading futurists on global trends and innovation. The New York Times has referred to him as one of the top three business gurus in the highest demand as a speaker.

He is a strategic advisor to executives from Fortune 500 companies, helping them to develop game-changing strategies based on his proven methodologies for capitalizing on technology innovations and their future impact. He is the author of seven books, including New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestseller Flash Foresight, as well as the highly acclaimed Technotrends.

The Anticipatory Organization

Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage

Greenleaf Book Group Press

Contents

Disproving a Dangerous Misconception

Apple sold a billion iPhones in ten short years — a phone that has also taken more pictures than any other camera in the world. Canon, Nikon, and Olympus certainly never saw that coming.

Would your organization have spotted the disruption those companies missed? Could you have developed a plan to profit from that disruption?

How did Uber devise a revolutionary taxi service without owning a single vehicle? Netflix is the largest movie theater on the planet — how were they able to develop a plan to achieve that without owning even one movie house? How did Mark Zuckerberg have the confidence to turn down Yahoo's offer of $1 billion to buy Facebook — and go on to develop the world's most popular social networking site without creating a sliver of original content?

Why didn't a cab driver think of Uber? Why didn't massive hospitality companies such as Marriott and Hilton come up with the billion-dollar concept used by Airbnb? What methodology made those sorts of game-changing innovations not just possible but viable? Does your organization know what it is? Does it know how to drive Exponential Innovation with relatively low risk just as Uber, Netflix, and Facebook did?

What competency are you missing?

In framing those questions, it's understandable to talk about certain traditional competencies that many consider essential to business success and growth — execution, maintaining a lean operation, and working toward zero defects, among others. In particular, the most recent is a focus on being agile: In trying to manage the increasing pace of disruption and change, the ability to react faster than the competition is the silver bullet.

Netflix excelled in its strategy of beating Blockbuster by mailing DVDs to its customers. Had they continued with just that, however, they would have missed a bigger opportunity: video streaming. Did their ability to execute at a high level enable them to identify and act on an even greater disruptive opportunity? The answer is no. Companies that disrupt an industry don't rely on traditional strategies and competencies that other organizations use every day.

Companies large and small that turn an entire industry on its ear have developed "the missing competency": a learnable skill to anticipate the future with remarkable accuracy, make decisions with greater confidence, and drive exponential, disruptive innovation with much lower risk and high levels of certainty in a world where uncertainty dominates.

The Missing Competency: The Ability To Anticipate

Ask yourself:

• What if you could see disruptions before they impacted your career, organization, and industry?

• What if you could accelerate innovation with far greater certainty and much lower risk?

• What if you could predict problems and solve them before they happened?

• What if you were able to establish a culture of incremental and exponential innovation in your organization?

Would finding the answers to these questions give you a personal and professional advantage? The answer, obviously, is a resounding yes. Who among us wouldn't embrace the opportunity to move beyond the frustrating struggle of merely reacting and responding?

You can learn to anticipate the future with more than enough accuracy to allow you to make decisions and plans with a high degree of certainty and much lower risk. Even better, learning to be anticipatory elevates skills and competencies you're already familiar with. Consider:

• Would an ability to predict and pre-solve problems help you to take your lean initiatives to the next level?

• If you could forecast the future with a high level of accuracy, would that naturally make your organization more agile?

• Would the ability to anticipate your customers' future problems allow you to develop low-risk products and services at the "speed of need?"

• Would pre-solving product problems naturally boost efforts to be as defect-free as possible?

Many will dismiss the ability to accurately forecast the future as a one-time epiphany that only those fortunate few — the Zuckerbergs and the Steve Jobs of the world — are mystically graced to experience. Maybe you're one of them: "I'm a businessperson. I'm not Jeff Bezos. I'm not Mark Zuckerberg. I can't see what those other guys saw. And those things only happen once in a lifetime."

To which I reply: "You're mistaken. The fact that you can catch an Uber to enjoy an evening at an Airbnb disproves the idea that only a few can anticipate the future. You can, too — if you know how."

This book is dedicated to sharing the process I've developed and shared with CEOs and top leaders throughout the world who have learned to turn change and disruption into advantage. It's called The Anticipatory Organization Model™ (or AO Model) and I'm going to show you how and why you can use it to transform the future of your organization.

Step One: The Base of The Mountain

We are living in a time of accelerating digital disruption — not mere change, but game-changing, transformational change. Revolutionary technology and business concepts are everywhere, rendering traditional systems and modes of thinking less relevant and often obsolete.

Moreover, all this extraordinary disruption and transformation is just getting started. We're only at square one, the base of the mountain. And what once might have been a gradual slope of 45 degrees has sharpened to the point where innovation is taking place at a vertical incline. Unfortunately, our path up the mountain is shrouded by the fog of the issues and events of the moment. An Anticipatory Mindset allows you to see through the fog and identify the opportunities most will miss.

Consider: It took 32 years from the time the zipper was invented until the technology was in place to actually allow something to be zipped up. Television took 29 years from invention to production — the transistor, ten...