Future Savvy: Quality in Foresight

Peter Bernstein, the author of “Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk,” died recently at the age of 90. In memoriam McKinsey Quarterly reposted this recent Bernstein interview. I put it up here because it’s a timely and timeless lesson in thinking about uncertainty and threats, and avoiding simplistic (quantitative) approaches to managing them – one of core themes of “Future Savvy.” Bernstein offers and endorsement of real options and explains why sophisticated Long Term Capital Management (LTCM) mathematical models to control risk created “a math dependency” that was blind to, among other things, unexpected systemic feedback to its own emergence:

One of the first things Bernstein says is that risk implies that we don’t know what will happen, which could be good things happening too. Risk management, as it is currently understood, gets executives to look at what could go wrong in the uncertain future of the enterprise. (Somehow threats are easier than opportunties to get departmental budget for.) The standard approach is to break risks down into commonly understood threat categories: a typical analysis would illuminated risks posed by technology failure, communications failure, security failure, natural disasters, accidents, or market/reputation risk, liability risk, financial/credit risk, and so on. This negative-outcome identification is typically followed by strategies to monitor, minimize, or control the risk event or its impact.

Doing all this is great, BUT it is just a narrow part of enterprise and industry foresight. Why? First, industry foresight or futures studies for business is focused as much on the opportunities change offers as on threats. Second, foresight tools (when correctly applied) set themselves the task of enlarging perspectives or mental maps so that we can see more things, or more possibilities than the generally expected set (whether good or bad). Set against this, risk management is little more than the catalog of known threats. The unknown or poorly understood threat, or unseen opportunity missed (and grabbed by others) is likely to be more damaging to the enterprise.

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Tags: decision-making, foresight tools & methods, future management, Future Savvy, industry foresight, managing uncertainty, mental models, paradigms, real options, risk

Top of the news yesterday along with Iran’s election protest was Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s statement that he — as leader of the right-wing Likud party — could endorse a Palestinian state. It was framed in conditions on Jewish-state recognition, and requirements on security, borders, refugees and Jerusalem that are, from today’s vantage point, very difficult to imagine Palestinians or Arab states agreeing to. So no change is expected. Even the breaking-story reporters had to admit that, rhetoric aside, this is not a breakthrough.

There’s an old joke in journalism from the 1970s that goes: “You can write the same headline on any and every story about Israel’s relationship with its neighbors: ‘Prospects for Middle-East Peace Dim.’”

Sure, it’s partly Eeyeore-ish journalist wit. But what’s interesting from a foresight point of view is that, running the world forward 40 years shows it was a reasonable understanding of the future. Why? Solid foresight is always predicated on a solid understanding of the forces for and against change. “Prospects for peace dim” acknowledged that forces and enablers of change were overpowered by what was preventing anything fundamental from happening (friction and blockers in Future Savvy terms.)

The basic truth is that Israel-Middle East is a complex situation characterized by a more-or-less equal balance of power. Israel has military and nuclear superiority, and US backing. Arab countries have oil, population numbers and population growth, and a billion more-or-less sympathetic moslems around the world, and therefore time on their side. They also have, particularly in Gaza, relatively widespread poverty and low welfare and educational development, which is  a force against moderation and therefore a negotiated settlement.

A genuine balance of power means we have equilibrium, and therefore should expect no change. That’s why we’ve had plenty of skirmishes, but no change in 40 years.

Looking out for the next 40 years, is this still the case? Can we write “Prospects for Middle East Peace Dim” on all news stories for another two generations? Following the foresight logic above, this depends on whether anything breaks the fundamental equilibrium. There are four issues apparently large enough to threaten the status quo:

• Water shortages and water conflicts
• Change in US policy
• The end of oil-based transport energy
• Iran going toxic

Water is a favorite of trend-foresight sessions. It sounds like the key issue in a rising-population world. In theory yes, but it’s unclear whether it will lead to anything more than local conflicts or wars, which in Israels case, we have already. On US policy, the Obama administration is attempting to show even-handedness, but its strategic interest lies with Israel as military ally and ideologically temperate (democratic, at least) bastion in the region. So no change there either. On oil, we are definitely in an era where – for security and climate change reasons – fossil fuel is entering it’s twilight phase, which will erode revenues and therefore power of ME Arab states. But, as mentioned earlier, poverty is as great an obstacle to peace as any other. (Remember the Israeli “let’s-grow-our-way-out-of the-situation-together peace platform of the 1990s, seeing tackling the development issues as the root of creating moderate mindsets across the region.)

That leaves Iran which may change the balance if it really goes toxic (develops and uses nuclear weapons in terror strikes.) This is a low futures likelihood – it’s not just luck that nukes have stayed in their box since 1945 – no state wants to carry the stain of the nuclear pariah for all time. There’s a moral blocker on this outcome that has worked for generations. Nuclear powers rattle, but the don’t bite. But … what if the wildcard scenario of a massive nuclear strike on Israeli soft targets were to happen, what then? The current low-grade hostile standoff would become a supernova, but we’d still have power balance, and while we have that we’ll have status quo and  journalists can expect to write “Prospects for Middle East Peace Dim” on top of every story about the region for another 40 years.

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Tags: 21st century, balance of power, development, environment, fossil fuels, future, journalism, long-term future, nuclear power, peak oil, population growth, poverty, predictions, US foreign policy, water conflicts

Normally I make a point of not reposting anything put up elsewhere, but this small list of foresight lessons deserves broader attention than just Electronics Weekly. According to EW blogger David Manners, Tsuyoshi Kawanishi, former CEO of Toshiba Semiconductors in his book Chip Management quotes 10 wisdoms of forecasting, see below.

They have a bit of the fashionable “SunTzu Art of War” feel to them, and some of the quotes may be apocryphal. But no matter. What’s really interesting in this very savvy list is how customer-focused the lessons are. As said in Future Savvy, and one can’t say it too many times, what customers (users, the public) want and the cost-benefit tradeoffs they will make is a MUCH more reliable guide to the future than any techno-fantasy.

The wisdoms also reflect a foresight industry insider truism and paradox: you seldom get to the future by asking the customer directly (e.g. in a focus group) what they would like to have. You have to leap for the customer (and use focus groups only to refine new offerings.)

The list:

“1. St Augustine said that it is a blessing from God that we can’t predict the future. If we predict prosperity, we will become complacent. If we predict evil, we will lose the ability to discriminate.

2 Sharp President Haruo Tsuji: ‘You cannot find out what the consumer wants only by doing market research. You need to pull the ideas out of your brain. Manufacturers of the future should not simply respond to market demands, they must create market demands.’

3. Konosuke Matsushita said: ‘Don’t try to fit your business to a forecast. Fit it to the needs of your customers.’

4. Toshiba President Sugiichio Watari: ‘Money doesn’t come falling into the headquarters of Toshiba. If you want money you need to go to the customers.’

5. President Yoshio Tateishi of Omron: ‘Learn from your customers. If you learn from internal resources you will become self-satisfied. If you learn from your competitors you will fall far behind.’

6. Professor Yoshiya Teramoto of Meiji Gakuin University: ‘When companies start a big market research project, it is one sign of the ‘big company’ disease.’

7. Tsuyoshi Kawanishi: ‘The way to predict the weather is to look at the sky. And, every once in a while, you can make your prediction by simply thinking.’

8. President Haruo Tsuji of Sharp says: ‘Don’t be a spider, be a honey bee.’

9. Takeshi Kaneda, a management critic, says: ‘After elaborate research to find out what the consumer wants, Ford produced the Edsel. It was a complete failure. Ford mistook what the customer wanted for what they would really buy. They ignored their insight and relied on consensus. Japanese tend to emphasize harmony and consensus. But insight and decisiveness can be more important.’

10. Someone says: ‘Figures do not lie. But liars often use figures.’”

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Tags: cost-benefit, customer, focus groups, Future Savvy, industry foresight, innovation, management, market forces, market research, predictions, public, technology change

College graduation is a fabulous time and place to think big, and therefore a good place to have a futurist do the thinking. Peter Schwartz recently gave the valedictory address to the 2009 graduating class of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (he graduated there in 1968) and offered a grand 10-point challenge list for techies of the future:

Allowing for the usual pep-talk style of these things, it’s possible to boil the list down to five key things, which will indeed be essential to technology enabled industry and social change in the lifetime of today’s college graduates:

1. Non-pulluting, inexhaustible energy. Schwartz mentioned potential sources including fusion and gasoline-excreting molecules. “We need something new for the long run, and it will require new physics, new chemistry, new materials, new biology, or likely some combination.”

2. A “bio-industrial revolution” to make production of goods more energy efficient and environmentally sustainable.

3. Advancing understanding of the human brain, and developing new means to combat aging effects.

4. Improving agriculture to raise yields while reducing environmental costs.

5. Better urban planning, civil engineering, and smart architecture for more sustainable cities.

A fairly well known list – yet these are the key issues. But the most interesting thing of all that Schwartz said was this:”graduates should not assume they can do it alone. Collaboration is a key ingredient of progress.”

“At some point in the next few years, probably by the time you are 30 … you will have to make a life trajectory decision that no one tells you about: Are you mainly going to work on your own or work through others?” Schwartz said. “Many engineers, scientists, artists, poets, writers have great lives working mostly by themselves. But there are many things you cannot do on your own. If you want to lead research teams in larger organizations, or design and construct new buildings, or make movies or start new businesses, the skills of human collaboration are essential to success.”

In other words, collaboration – the means to and willingness to and resources to collaborate (globally) – is a key enabler of important breakthroughs. In theory everyone knows this and everyone agrees. But how much of competitive and legal process is all about protecting individual or national work, that is disrupting collaboration?

So in addition to the grand technology challenges for coming lifetimes, I offer a similar grand policy challenge (perhaps for Kennedy School grads of 2009): create the policies that genuinely promote and encourage collaboration. Do not encourage people, or companies, or countries to see benefit in working on their own. Facilitate and reward information sharing at every level… and then the Rensselaer grads and their equivalent around the country and the world will really be able to create the future that Schwartz envisions.

For event report see Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute http://news.rpi.edu/update.do?artcenterkey=2585

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Tags: 21st century, Add new tag, environment, innovation, long-term future, technology change, technology foresight

Apocalyptic predictions are designed to be wrong. The point of doing them, as with “1984,” “Brave New World,” “When the Wind Blows,” etc., is to raise consciousness to negative outcomes and engender action so that the prediction, by succeeding in purpose makes itself incorrect in fact. “The Age of Stupid” is this all over. See the trailer here:

There is also a documentary about how the movie was funded and made.

Set in 2055, post the environmental global climate change collapse, it features last-man-on-earth (Pete Postlethwaite) as an archivist in a tower refuge somewhere in the Arctic north of Norway sifting through records of human life before it was wiped out, trying to find out why people did nothing to stop the eco-catastrophe that was imminent. The plot device allows filmmaker Franny Armstrong, (director of McLibel, 2005, about environmentalists who successfully challenged McDonalds) to showcase a selection of real reportage and news clips from today to withering effect. Like any good scenario it gives granularity: dates, names, actions, timelines. It points fingers and mentally readies the reader-watcher to act.

By all accounts this is a punchier movie than Al Gore-fronted “An Inconvenient Truth (2006),” and punchy is what is required to effect the goals of a future-influencing forecasting, that is, an assault on the powers that be and/or on public complacency.

By the way, if you want to see the best activist consciousness-raising movie (ever!) see Pete Postlethwaite in the anti-Thatcherite “Brassed Off.”

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Tags: 21st century, communication, dystopia, environment, long-term future, long-term thinking, media, movies, natural resources, predictions, questioning assumptions, scenarios, social change, trend tracking

I’ve been quite careful not to use this blog as a “brag wall” for Future Savvy. I can say reviewers have all been glowing, without exception. But this review, below, which recently appeared in the St Andrews Management Institute’s Vector Magazine, I felt was worth reposting here because – more than just saying nice things – it also captures the essence of what the book is trying to do. Here it is:

Book reviews by SAMI fellows and associates
“Future Savvy” by Adam Gordon (American Management Association, 2009)

“Forecasts and predictions are ubiquitous. We are bombarded with views of the future on a plethora of subjects from myriad sources, with a diverse set of motivations and self-interests. Adam Gordon seeks to provide a practical users guide to the assessment and interpretation of all things about the future, with special emphasis on the cautions and ‘health warnings’ that need to be applied, so as not to be misled by forecasts. However, the author is careful not to veer towards over-cynical dismissal of all future projections; rather, he seeks to provide guidance to the reader on how to apply the necessary caveats, and in the author’s words “profit from change”.

The book covers a very broad field, from the basic issues of the misuse of data and statistics, covering the quality and validity of data as well as their misinterpretation, through technology forecasting, trend and horizon scanning to quantitative modelling and scenarios. The one theme common to all these activities is the need to be alert to bias, whether it be a deliberate motive to influence behaviour through a dire prediction; or a bias inherent in futurologists needing to see rapid and pervasive change in all areas of society – if it exists or not – and evangelising it.

The track record of much futurology is mixed. Well-known examples are quoted: television did not lead to the end of the cinema industry. Nor has space exploration led to people taking foreign holidays on other planets – yet! Bias may also lie in the beholder. The ‘Zeitgeist’ tendency, whereby we are all influenced by contemporary perceptions, affects not only how “experts” and professionals see the world, but also how the audience receives the views of the future – often with unprepared minds. The internal “official future” of an organisation can pose a real blind spot to its progress.

The weaknesses of much quantitative modelling are highlighted, with such forecasts only being as good as the assumptions on which they are based, but which are often not overtly stated. In contrast to the conceptual and practical errors inherent in much futures output, the role and advantages of scenario planning are emphasised as a tool for challenging assumptions and developing alternative futures: “It’s better to be vaguely right than precisely wrong”.

The penultimate chapter takes examples of relatively recent forecasts from a range of organisations, whose subjects range from US agricultural production to UK dementia sufferers. These are subjected to a form of ‘retro wind-tunnelling’ to illustrate the deficiencies in their construction and how they would have benefited from the application of methodologies described earlier in the book. The final chapter provides a summary checklist, or framework, to apply in evaluating forecasts and future predictions.

Adam Gordon has written a shrewd and perceptive book that deserves a wide readership, especially among managers in both the private and public sectors, as well as the familiar ‘general reader’. Those wishing a more detailed technical guide to the various forecasting and futurist methodologies will need to consult other standard works. Professionals in the fields of management and strategy consulting and scenario practitioners might well be familiar with many of the points made in the book. However, those with some savvy might do well to recommend the book to their clients.

Michael Owen, 20 April 2009

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Tags: "official future", bias, data, forecasts, foresight, Future Savvy, futurology, predictions, quantitative modeling, scenarios, statistics, technology foresight, trends, zeitgeist

There’s an interesting Information Week article Google Tracking System Suggests Swine Flu Is Spreading posted yesterday (April 29) that investigates the possible predictive power of Googling (human search) activity, suggesting increased searching / monitoring of swine flu on Google could be predictive of rising levels of infection. Google says country-specific (Mexico) data for 19-25 April shows a spike in flu searches.

Pic: thisislondon.co.uk

Google introduced “Google Flu Trends” (US) in November as a way to visualize correlation between flu infections and flu-related searches. It maintains search levels provide early warning of flu spread because search data can be gathered and analyzed almost instantly, unlike traditional epidemiological reporting methods. (More on the goal of the project is in a post on swine flu on the official Google blog.)

The predictive power of Google spikes is hardly clear. Yes, a spike could suggest increased levels of infection. But it could be cause by media coverage and rising levels of pandemic concern.

Google predicts “no pandemic”

More broadly, however, the Google search phenomenon, and information saturation that goes with it is, I believe, highly predictive in epidemic situations. It predicts they are very unlikely. Generally, knowledge is power. Specifically deep and easily searchable public knowledge of where the epidemic is, and what to do to avoid it, and avoid spreading it, is a new condition in human history, one which in fact reliably predicts that no pandemic will happen. Yes, strains become more virulent and dangerous and even drug resistant, and yes, airlines transport it around the world in hours. But the power of knowledge in the labs and in the public at large is immense and ubiquitous in a way it never was before.

One of the debates in futures studies is how much and in what way to look at the past as a guide to the future. Paul Saffo says: look back at least as twice as far as you are trying forecast, and I agree with that. In thinking about a major modern global health epidemic our minds are in fact deeply conditioned by a 90-year-old event: the 1918 Influenza Pandemic that killed an estimated 50 million worldwide. In that epidemic there were particular conditions, not least four year of devastating war where more were lost to disease than fighting; associated drain on resistance and infrastructure; and forced mobiization of troops under poor conditions, that greatly facilitated the spread of the disease. Most importantly, ordinary people were operating in a knowledge vaccum that is unimaginable today.

This is not to say that we should not be vigilant and prepared. But the future that we most likely face is many-and-regular outbreaks like the swine flu, the avian flu, and so on, which we will move fairly quickly to contain. The dystopia of world pandemic is appealing to the health crisis community and its service providers, but the future will not be history (1918-1920) repeating itself.

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Tags: 20th Century, communication, dystopia, epidemic, forecast filtering, future, future studies, heal, predictions, public health

A basic tool of foresight work is horizon scanning, that is, scanning for signals of change, early portent of trends, straws in the wind of change. Futurists do it habitually, and if not habitually then – the wisdom is – do it routinely by consciously scanning sources of information you don’t normally. Buying an agricultural weekly or teen idol rag at the airport, rather than your standard dose of the Economist.

It was in this spirit that I picked up the UK launch issue (aka May 2009) of Wired. Actually it’s not the first launch. Wired was in the UK ten years ago, but Condé Nast withdrew it in the dot.com crash. In the US at the time, I remember when Wired, the poster child of the Silicon Valley / Nasdaq bonanza, was almost as thick as a phone book each month. But those days were soon over.

Anyway, who could resist an offering that was about to tell me about my “Life in the future. “Fake Meat, Robots and Electro-Sex: the World is About to Change.” On the cover are, I kid you not, flying cars!

Now, I wouldn’t take this stuff seriously for a moment, if everyone else promised not to. But they don’t. So here we go. In the “What’s Next?” cover story 46 experts make 99 predictions about the next 40 years, and none of them will happen, or not in the time frame expressed.

Oh, moon settlement?

I shrink from sharing the list. Meal replacement patches, check. Moon settlement, check. The male pill, check. Every techno-fantasy of the jockish sci-fi world, check. Well, let’s stop on the male pill for a moment. Can we not do it? Sure we can do it – today. What’s stopping it is not technology. It is attitudes (machismo, essentially). So Wired experts are telling us that this will go away in a decade. Puh-leez.

I hardly need mention there’s no method given behind any of these expert forecasts.

Don’t you think Wired should be asking themselves why, in 2009, they are producing 186 pages of dead tree and carting it around the country in carbon-emitting trucks? Technology-vision may lead you to a view of the future. But it’s unreliable. The future is determined by what consumers are ready for. Well, that’s one of the 20-or-so key forecast filtering principles of Future Savvy.

Perhaps we should look at the cover story for what it is really about – which is selling magazines. Because, there’s no doubt that tech is changing, and many new capabilities are coming on stream, and this is very, very fascinating to imagine uses for. And this fascination is what Wired packages and sells. Don’t bet any money on the predictions though, certainly not their timeline.

But sturdy in some areas

Aside from the predicting lark, it’s a good magazine of its kind. The features are well-conceived, well-written, for example, one about how the BBC iPlayer business was built; a feature on sea salvage; a profile of PayPal founder Elon Musk; the David X Li formula and how it mis-calculated risk, and so on. Great stuff. Actually quite a sturdy business-oriented-view of techno-change, if you can get past the boys-with-toys riff of the magazine as a whole.

So, actually, much to like. Just, please, don’t think a lad’s mag is going to tell you anything coherent about the future.

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Tags: 21st century, emerging technologies, failed predictions, forecast filtering, future, Future Savvy, innovation, long-term future, long-term thinking, media, predictions, publishing, scanning, social change, technology change, technology foresight

There’s been a storm in the past few days over Amazon.com excluding “adult” books from its sales rankings. Among the almost 60,000 books affected was not just Erotica. Feminist books, Gay & Lesbian titles, and books in Health, Mind & Body, and Reproductive & Sexual Medicine also disappeared from the rankings

Amazon the new Wal-Mart? pic:Huffington Post

According to yesterday’s LA Times Amazon says the whole thing was a cataloging error. But when author Mark Probst had previously contacted Amazon for an explanation, he got this: “In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists.”

Aside: Everyone is trying to figure out what Twitter is good for, or how it will be used, and it has become clear that one application is to quickly aggregate mass protest, evidenced in the anti-Amazon outrage, see Twitter “Amazonfail.”

Author Maya Reynolds has been connecting the dots in the future of publishing, watching Amazon move via acquisitions such as Abe Books, Audible, BookFinder, BookSurge, Brilliance Audio, FillZ, GoJaba, Library Thing, Mobipocket and Shelfari.

She is among various industry watchers who claim, with fair evidence, that Amazon is following a “Wal-Mart” strategy – the well-documented essence of which is to gain enough retailer power to be able to pressure suppliers (telling them what to make or what to charge, or exacting special discounts) to achieve better retail prices and get more retailer power, in a reinforcing spiral which, inter alia, squeezes all the healthy mom-’n-pop-shop diversity and other balances of power out of the industry.

In a post of July 08 she paints the full dystopia scenario:
“1. First, the smaller presses, POD presses and e-publishers will disappear as Amazon’s margins squeeze them out of business. Amazon will help the process along by offering better terms to authors if they will use BookSurge’s POD press and Kindle’s e-book to publish. Even if authors don’t embrace Amazon initially, as their publishers go out of business, they will be forced to do so.
“2. Brick-and-mortar stores have two constraints which Amazon does not: (1) limited shelf space and (2) a limited geographic range. Bookstores carry books “on spec,” filling their shelves with stock they hope readers will seek. Amazon, on the other hand, has unlimited virtual shelf space and unlimited geographic reach. Amazon does not have to warehouse stock. They can wait until a book is actually ordered and the money is in hand before using a digital file and BookSurge to print the book. Because they cannot match the deep discounts Amazon offers, bricks-and-mortar bookstores–already under siege–will be squeezed out of existence.
“3. Like Wal-Mart, Amazon will continue to apply pressure on publishers to give more favorable terms. Wal-Mart’s suppliers used cheaper materials and out-sourced to cheaper overseas labor. As the publishing houses’ profit margins are squeezed, their cost-cutting efforts will take three directions: (1) Focus even more attention on signing best-selling authors whose work is guaranteed to sell; (2) Begin to pressure their mid-list authors to accept lower advances and lower royalty percentages; and (3) Sign fewer and fewer new authors because of the uncertainty and the expense of growing a new writer.

Where will they go?

“4. Mid-list authors and new authors, unable to either find a publisher or unwilling to accept the low royalties, will seek to self-publish. Where will they go? Since, by that time, most of the self-publishing houses will have gone out of business, they will go to Amazon’s BookSurge or to Amazon’s e-book division, Kindle. Amazon will welcome them.
“5. The next death on the food chain will be the publishers and agents themselves. First the mid-level publishers will die. Well-known agents and the larger houses will be protected for a period of time by their best-selling authors who are loyal to them. However, as those cash cows die off, so will the agents and larger houses. A new paradigm will emerge: Amazon as both publisher and retailer.
“6. Eventually Amazon will have so much power, they will be able to decide WHAT is worthy of being published. Welcome to the future of publishing.”

Is this the future of publishing? The logic of unregulated industry power suggests it is. But Future Savvy says response – regulation – is also likely. As with Microsoft and many before them, when Amazon gets too powerful, anti-trust regulators should be in business. But only if their hand is pushed. Articulate and persuasive dystopias such as Reynolds’ are the single most powerful mechanism by which the word is spread (spread it! forward it, tweet it!) so that enough consumers get to see and believe threatening future outcomes early enough, and pressure regulators to act.

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Tags: books, dystopia, future strategy, industry foresight, long-term thinking, media, publishing, scenarios, short-term future, twitter

Strategy and Management guru Gary Hamel recently had things to say on the WSJ blog about how management needs to evolve, as follows:

Says Hamel, “The experience of growing up online will profoundly shape the workplace expectations of “Generation F” – the Facebook Generation. At a minimum, they’ll expect the social environment of work to reflect the social context of the Web, rather than as is currently the case, a mid-20th-century Weberian bureaucracy.

“If your company hopes to attract the most creative and energetic members of Gen F, it will need to understand these Internet-derived expectations, and then reinvent its management practices accordingly.”

He cites 12 work-relevant “the post-bureaucratic realities” that tomorrow’s employees will use as yardsticks in determining whether your company is “with it” or “past it.” These are:

1. All ideas compete on an equal footing.
2. Contribution counts for more than credentials.
3. Hierarchies are natural, not prescribed.
4. Leaders serve rather than preside.
5. Tasks are chosen, not assigned.
6. Groups are self-defining and -organizing.
7. Resources get attracted, not allocated.
8. Power comes from sharing information, not hoarding it.
9. Opinions compound and decisions are peer-reviewed.
10. Users can veto most policy decisions.
11. Intrinsic rewards matter most.
12. Hackers are heroes.

One hesitates to question Hamel, whose edifice of work, bookended by Competing for the Future (1994) and The Future of Management (2007) is as eloquent and substantiated a guide for innovation and future-thinking in management as you will find.

But, what is startling, for those of us around long enough to remember the Web-excited 1990s, which includes Hamel of course, is that these 12 principles are really old stuff, the mantras of the Internet 1.0 … the needs of Gen F are apparently not different to the needs of Gen Y.

But, now it’s a dozen years later, and this future is still the future. Hmm.

New management, but not in old bottles

Actually, surely Hamel’s beef is with the Fortune 500 set particularly, because what has happened is that most small and niche companies have already embraced a big chunk of these new-management attributes. It’s specifically the Fortune 500 that lags: but then, running organizations with stakeholders and budgets resembling mid-sized countries seems to fly in the face of Gen F value set.

Looking abroad, it appears that a Chinese factory or an Indian call center are not about to convert to Gen-F values either. Command and control, and uncreative hyper-attention attention to margins — effected by the Weberian bureaucracy — is the route to profit for them. The old paradigm will rule, and rule well.

From the Future Savvy vantage point, the real future will have, broadly speaking, two types of firm, the Weberian and the Gen-F. Firms running 19th century-type businesses will run them in 19C ways. Funky firms exploiting new ideas have already changed management style significantly and will continue to do so.

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Tags: 19th century, 21st century, creative, decision-making, forecast filtering, Fortune 500, future management, future strategy, new management, paradigms, Web