Rogue Waves: Future-Proof Your Business to Survive and Profit from Radical Change

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U: Uncouple Your Opportunities from Your Threats

Work backward from your potential futures to identify and exploit key decision and trigger points.

Born in Florence in 1454, Amerigo Vespucci was a scholar, a geographer, and a businessman. One of the merchants he worked for invested in Cristobal Columbus’s 1492 expedition and won a contract to provision his second. After outfitting several other voyages of discovery, Vespucci got the itch to go west himself, first on commission from others, then as captain of his own ship.

Little was known about the far side of the Atlantic at that time. Columbus had gotten no further south than the north coast of modern-day Colombia. Was it a large island, like Madagascar? The west coast of Asia, as Columbus ...