June 2006 Archives

Here you’ll find a collection of articles published during the month of June 2006.

Excerpts from Stop Flying Blind

By Michael Mace on June 19, 2006

Nobody can predict the future of a market or business perfectly. If I could do it, I’d be retired someplace living off my stock income. If the authors of all those management books could do it, they wouldn’t have to write books and give speeches for a living.

Part of the problem is that the world’s very complex, and any absolute prediction is bound to break down as unexpected things happen. But the biggest challenge is that the future doesn’t yet exist. It’s no a single deterministic thing, it’s a set of possibilities. We change the future every day with our own decisions. So what we need for the future isn’t a prediction. We need a map, showing all the possibilities and consequences of various decisions: if you go here you’ll end up in a valley, if you go there you’ll end up in the mountains — and if you go over there you’ll run off a cliff.

The better you draw the map of possibilities, the better your company can choose a good future for itself and its customers.

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