Future Perfect - Stan Davis

When Tom Peters called Future Perfect ”the book of the decade” ten years ago it wasn’t hyperbole, it was understatement. This tenth anniversary edition of Future Perfect, with a new introduction and updated notes by the author, is even more relevant than it was when the book was first published. It’s as if we’ve had to move further into the world Davis describes to fully grasp the degree of his prescience, and the wisdom of his analysis.Future Perfect is the book for business readers who are tired of learning the latest buzzword only to find that it’s been supplanted by another. The words Davis asks us to consider are time, space, and mass. When you begin to think of these basic dimensions of the physical universe as the fundamental resources of our economy, the possibilities for creative thinking become infinite. And you find a lasting way of understanding business challenges.Many of Davis’s concepts that seemed ”way out” ten years ago have become part of our standard way of thinking about business. Everyone talks about operating ”any time, any place” and ”mass customization,” phrases Davis coined for use in business. Yet, as he points out in his new introduction, while business may be able to scurry to keep up with changes in technology, the economy, and society, organizations can’t change as fast as the businesses they are managing. It may take two years to implement an organizational change that supports your ”any time” business. Then you have an organization perfectly appropriate for 1996, but you have a 1998 business to run. ”We would be much better off,” he says, ”using models that never fall behind in the first place.”How do we do that? ”By confronting the fact that business operates by the economic rules of the marketplace, whereas organizations operate by the social, psychological, and political rules of the workplace. If we want businesses and their organizations to work together in lock-step, rather than in lag-step, then they must operate by the same rules.”This new edition of Future Perfect gives us strategies and models for the next ten years and beyond.