Signals for Strategists

This book is for strategists—leaders, managers, entrepreneurs—who are so caught up in the daily pressures of business that they're missing key signals of their future reality. It's like driving a car heads down, staring at the dashboard, rather than heads up, looking through the windshield. We need to do both. The book is devoted to the practice of sensing, or scanning the horizon for signs of emerging trends. The sooner we see them, the better our response.

Each chapter starts with a set of signals—data we observed that, taken together, helped us to reveal a trend. The impact of new technology on strategy is a theme of the book, and each chapter looks at how organizations are using new technologies to their advantage.

The goal is to spark meaningful conversations within organizations: How could we participate in the collaborative economy? What could our CIO and our CMO be doing to drive strategy, innovation, and revenue growth? What could we do to leverage the Internet of Things and intelligent automation as catalysts of invention? Could we use MOOCs as pivots for corporate training, recruiting, and marketing? How might technology transform the manufacturing process, our supply chain, and the knowledge work that we do? Could we take advantage of the renaissance in domestic energy (oil and gas)? What could we be doing to counter cyber crime? What is our organization doing to tune into signals of emerging trends that may be relevant to us?