Future First: How Successful Leaders Turn Innovation Challenges into New Value Frontiers

Future First is a practical guide for any business leader who wants to build, expand, or reinvent their company by finding new value in global challenges. Traditional companies often view issues like income equality, global warming, and resource scarcity as "problems." By contrast, future first leaders understand them as opportunities, as innovation challenges.

Through real-life business examples ranging from Nike to Opower, this book lays out how to identify and adopt the future first leadership mindset and business capabilities required to achieve lasting and integrated performance results. Future First examines how leaders from companies including Unilever, Etsy, Revolution Foods, Method Products, and others have adopted this mindset toward innovation and people practices, accelerating business ecosystem transformation.

Alice Mann, an organizational psychologist with twenty years of experience consulting and coaching on executive leadership, organization design, and business transformation, interviewed scores of business leaders to understand how their companies are expanding into new value frontiers. Future First makes a convincing argument that successful partnerships and alliances among big global companies and small mission-driven ones can reshape the global ecosystems of apparel, food, automobiles, and energy, and remake the future of our world.

Alice Mann advises senior executives to build their leadership teams and design their organizations to achieve their mission and strategy. Mann has consulted with and coached scores of leaders of global Fortune 500 companies, preeminent non-profits, and social enterprises to inspire and deliver strong performance results.

Mann is a former vice president at JPMorgan Chase, where she led large post-merger reorganization efforts. Mann holds a PhD and MA in social and organizational psychology from Columbia University and a BA in history from Reed College, USA. Additionally, she earned a two-year organizational dynamics certification from the William Alanson White Institute. Mann has also taught a graduate course called Leading People at Columbia University. She lives with her family in New York.