The time to come - as well as the exploration thereof - remains elusive for social actors and social scientists alike. The contributors accept the challenge to depict young men and women's future-creating activities in urban contexts of sub-Saharan Africa. Very consciously, they study young graduates having obtained a university degree and provide a vivid picture of their strategies to socially grow older by doing adulthood in contexts of great uncertainty. The examples include Burkina Faso, Guinea, Ethiopia, Mali and Tanzania, visually enriched through pictures taken by young Malian photographers.
Foreword by Joseph Coates In the next 50 years, new technologies, shifting global economics, and many other factors will present innumerable changes for business and society to navigate. Starting now, leaders need to be more flexible, responsive, and decisive than ever before. Unfortunately, most people are not trained in the type of critical thinking required to anticipate what lies ahead. This groundbreaking book will change that. Futuring is not a matter of tea leaves and crystal balls -- it is a rigorous science based on time-tested analytical methods. Future, Inc. translates the proven techniques of professional futurists into accessible language and shows how to: * identify what is and what isn't changing at a given time, and how even small changes will affect whole businesses * use forecasting -- not ""predictions"" -- to pinpoint tomorrow's realities by looking at today's trends * employ scenarios to test the validity of potential strategies The author illustrates his advice with examples of companies whose foresight has given them an unparalleled advantage and identifies significant trends that will impact businesses in the future. Companies can't afford to be caught unaware. In order to survive and succeed, they need to look ahead. Future, Inc. provides the tools to bring the future into focus.
John Kao, a master of innovation, shows how you can put your life and business on a trajectory to uncommon success. The journey begins with a conceptual prototype of your own making and ends with you realizing your ambition. Representatives of our newest client, a pharmaceutical maker, arrived this morning at 7:45--six executives, all eager to get started. They stared at the emptiness of our white walls but said nothing. I asked them to explain what brought them to us. "It’s simple," one of them said, knowing it wasn’t simple at all. "We’re a $40 billion-a-year corporation, and we want to keep growing at 7 percent annually. In other words, we need another $2.8 billion in sales every year." I tapped the calculator on my iPhone. "That’s about $54 million a week," I said. "We don’t care about some $100 million opportunity," the man went on. "Only mega-ideas will do." "What you need," I said, "is the equivalent of two dozen blockbuster movies a year."
Future Challenges in Sustainable Development within the Built Environment stimulates and reinterprets the demands of Responsible and Sustainable Development in the Built Environment for future action and development. It examines the methods of evaluation, the use of technology, the creation of new models and the role of human factors for examining and developing the subject over the next twenty years.
This volume covers a timely debate in contemporary security studies: can armed forces adjust to the rising challenge of insurgency and terrorism, the greatest transformation in warfare since the birth of the international system? Containing essays by leading international security scholars and military professionals, it explores the Fourth-Generation Warfare thesis and its implications for security planning in the twenty-first century. No longer confined to the fringes of armed conflict, guerrilla warfare and terrorism increasingly dominate world-wide military planning. For the first time since the Vietnam War ended, the problems of insurgency have leapt to the top of the international security agenda and virtually all countries are struggling to protect themselves against terrorist threats. Coalition forces in Afghanistan and Iraq are bogged down by an insurgency, and are being forced to rely on old warfare tactics rather than modern technologies to destroy their adversaries. These theorists argue that irregular warfare—insurgencies and terrorism—has evolved over time and become progressively more sophisticated and difficult to defeat as it is not centred on high technology and state of the art weaponry. Global Insurgency and the Future of Armed Conflict will be of interest to students of international security, strategic studies and terrorism studies.
Catastrophic climate change overshadows the present and the future. Wrenching economic transformations have devastated workers and hollowed out communities. However, those fighting for jobs and those fighting for the planet have often been at odds. Does the world face two separate crises, environmental and economic? The promise of the Green New Deal is to tackle the threat of climate change through the empowerment of working people and the strengthening of democracy. In this view, the crisis of nature and the crisis of work must be addressed together—or they will not be addressed at all. This book brings together leading experts to explore the possibilities of the Green New Deal, emphasizing the future of work. Together, they examine transformations that are already underway and put forth bold new proposals that can provide jobs while reducing carbon consumption—building a world that is sustainable both economically and ecologically. Contributors also debate urgent questions: What is the value of a federal jobs program, or even a jobs guarantee? How do we alleviate the miseries and precarity of work? In key economic sectors, including energy, transportation, housing, agriculture, and care work, what kind of work is needed today? How does the New Deal provide guidance in addressing these questions, and how can a Green New Deal revive democracy? Above all, this book shows, the Green New Deal offers hope for a better tomorrow—but only if it accounts for work’s past transformations and shapes its future.
The first public parks were created on urban 'greenfields'. Once these designated sites had been used, cities looked towards post-industrial sites, and built parks in places that had suffered from environmental degradation, neglect, abandonment and conflict. With finite stocks of urban post-industrial land now also approaching exhaustion, more ways of making parks are required to create inclusive, accessible and resilient urban places. Future Park invites Australian built environment professionals and policymakers to consider the future of parks in our cities. Including spectacular images of public spaces throughout the world, the book describes the economic, social and environmental benefits of urban parks, and then outlines the threats and challenges facing cities and communities in an age when more than half the world's population are urban dwellers. Future Park introduces the need to embrace new public park thinking to ensure that benefits continue to be realised. Future Park illustrates imaginative and resourceful responses to real challenges by highlighting recent proposals and projects. These projects coalesce around four broad themes – linkages, obsolescences, co-locations and installations – responding to contemporary urban paradoxes, and ensuring parks continue to play a vital role in the lives of our cities.
Get it straight from the top: secrets only the world’s best leaders can tell you! What it takes to lead your team to greatness! Outstanding leaders tell you how to identify and fix even the biggest problems...get buy-in that’s real...balance external customers and internal processes...infuse creativity throughout your organization, and reinvent its future...get results, not salutes! From world-renowned leaders and experts, including Captain D. Michael Abrashoff, Jim Champy, Fred Wiersema, Dean LeBaron, Michael F. Golden, Gary Hirshberg, and many more. Included in this collection: Changing a Troubled Ship’s Course (Captain D. Michael Abrashoff) What’s the Problem with Customers? (Fred Wiersema) Get Results, Not Salutes (Captain D. Michael Abrashoff) Winning Customers with Commitment (Gary Hirshberg) Listen Up! (Captain D. Michael Abrashoff) Clearing the Mind for Creativity (John Kao) No Company Runs Itself (Michael F. Golden) Why I’m (Still) Buying Gold (Dean LeBaron) How to Design a Great Customer Experience (Fred Wiersema) Oprah (Brand) Renew (Nancy F. Koehn) The Future Is Yours to Invent (John Kao) The Pull of Customers, The Push of Processes (Jim Champy) How to Rebound from Adversity (Glenn Mangurian) What I Learned from Peter Drucker (Jim Champy) What I Learned at the Naval Academy (Captain D. Michael Abrashoff) Lessons of a Brand Manager (Michael F. Golden)
Modelling is an important tool for understanding the complexity of forest ecosystems and the variety of interactions of ecosystem components, processes and values. This book describes the hybrid approach to modelling forest ecosystems and their possible response to natural and management-induced disturbance. The book describes the FORECAST family of ecosystem management models at three different spatial scales (tree, stand and landscape), and compares them with alternative models at these three spatial scales. The book will help forest managers to understand what to expect from ecosystem-based forest models; serve as a tool for use in teaching about sustainability, scenario analysis and value trade-offs in natural resources management; and assist policy makers, managers and researches working in assessment of sustainable forest management and ecosystem management. Several real-life examples of using the FORECAST family of models in forest management and other applications are presented from countries including Canada, China, Spain and the USA, to illustrate the concepts described in the text. The book also demonstrates how these models can be extended for scenario and value trade-off analysis through visualization and educational or management games.
