Beating the Global Odds: Successful Decision-making in a Confused and Troubled World

Pulling It All Together and Getting Ready to Beat the Global Odds

If you’ve stayed with me this long, you know the many ways in which it’s become a really topsy-turvy world out there—and getting ever faster, bumpier, and more complex with each passing day. But it’s also a world brimming over with new opportunities (and, indeed, new hope) for those ready to chart a new course. Farsighted entrepreneurs and innovators have gotten right on with bringing simplicity, delight, and a lighter use of materials and energy to whatever they do (with the ever-greater complexity inside hidden away from the human eye and brain). The onrush of new technology and terabytes of new information—at times the source of today’s sense of overload and frazzle—now offer more promise than ever for helping us sort out the critical information wheat from the data chaff.

As I’ve counseled in this book (and I’ve taken my own medicine), we all need to try to steer carefully to avoid the two bipolar extremes of wait-and-see inaction and frenzied hyperactivity. In order to find that creative mean, we need to take time regularly to pause, to clarify our thinking and strategies, and to critically examine our assumptions (especially those that happen to mirror whatever today’s herd-mentality, common wisdom happens to be). And we need to become omnivores, too: Vary your information diet, and personally go out in the world to check out remarkable emerging people, ideas, places, products, and services for yourself. Of ...