Epiphany Z: Eight Radical Visions for Transforming Your Future - Softcover

Frey, Thomas

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1683500172 ISBN 13: 9781683500179

Publisher: Morgan James Publishing, 2017

Synopsis

"Epiphany Z" is Futurist Thomas Frey’s dynamic approach to envisioning, comprehending, and ultimately thriving in the radically different futures emerging around us at the speed of light.

Frey’s unparalleled ability to detect emerging trends from the smallest of clues gives him an edge on other futurists. Now he’s sharing that edge with you.

What are tomorrow’s hottest industries?

What huge industries of today are doomed to extinction?

How will our lives be changed by advancements in robotics, in drone technology, in manufacturing and transportation?

How can education cope with the explosive new world of enhanced information, hyperactive business environments, cultural shifts that would have been unimaginable as recently as yesterday?

Who will be the masters of tomorrow’s universe and who will be left behind?

Above all, how can you not only protect yourself from the most disruptive aspects of the changes sweeping your way---how can you become one of the masters of those changes?

Distilling decades of research, experience, and proven success in correctly identifying and accurately extrapolating today’s trends and innovations into tomorrow’s realities, Thomas Frey gives you an advance ticket to the most explosive period of change in all of human history.

Those changes are taking place now. Thomas Frey shows where they will be taking all of us tomorrow. "EPIPHANY Z" your roadmap to the future.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Frey, Google’s top-rated futurist speaker, former Innovations editor for Futurist magazine, was also, during an earlier phase of his career, IBM’s most award-winning engineer. After leaving IBM, Frey co-founded the DaVinci Institute, a Colorado-based think tank and networking resource focused on anticipating and defining future trends and innovations. Frey currently divides his time between Colorado and dozens of speaking engagements around the world.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

DESIGNING THE DASHBOARD OF YOUR DESTINY

I am a Futurist. Futurism is part of who I am as well as my profession. I spend my time studying, researching, thinking, writing, consulting and speaking about the future, a future that is coming into existence far faster than the second by second movement of the clock would indicate.

Anyone who has lived more than a very few years can see that our present is quite different from even our recent past. If you’ve got more than a decade of years behind you, you’ve witnessed transformations---technological, economic, social, geopolitical---unimaginable to your parents when they held you as a newborn.

How do we best prepare ourselves---and our families, children, colleagues and co-workers and employees, our businesses and institutions, the world at large---for the dramatic transformations and disruptions that will accompany the enormous opportunities and possibilities the will present to us?

By learning how to think differently about the future.

Specifically, by developing the tools, skills and abilities---intellectual, intuitional, psychological, emotional---that enable us to participate in the development of the future coming our way, not simply to experience it, or, unfortunately for too many, let it wash over us or, sadly, let it wash us away.

"Epiphany Z" is my framework for developing those tools and skills and abilities, those qualities that will be necessary, even essential, if your dashboard is to really provide you with the information you need to control your destiny, or if it will only provide you with information about the forces controlling you.

And the first step toward taking control of your future is to re-think your relationship with the future.

We live in a very backward-looking society. We are backward-looking because we have all personally experienced the past. When we look around us, we see evidence of the past everywhere. All information is essentially history. The past is very knowable and very comfortable.

Yet, we will be spending the rest of our lives in the future

From everything I’ve studied, past observers have focused on the concept of the future as being a consequence of time, rather than a stand-alone force of nature.

But---is the future merely the result of the movement of time, or is the future itself a definable force?

My raising of this question has led more than a few of my colleagues to think of me as that crazy guy who assigns human attributes to this thing we call the future. I don’t think I’m crazy, but I will admit that on occasion you can hear me uttering phrases like, “I know it’s going to be a great day because the future is clearly happy with me today.” Or, “No, that’s not a good idea because the future is probably going to push it off a cliff.”

I don’t really think that the future is deliberately smiling upon me some days, frowning in my direction on others.

I do think that the future is a definable force, and that by studying the future we not only prepare ourselves to better handle the changes it brings our way, we also equip ourselves to, as the chapter title says, design the dashboard of our destiny.

Why is it so important to study the future? For starters, we all have a vested interest in it. We will all be living in the future.

Edition details

• Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1683500172
• ISBN 13: 9781683500179
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 204