Rethinking the Future Quotes

“There is no golden route to glory and happiness in life.”
― Rowan Gibson, Rethinking the Future: Rethinking Business Principles, Competition, Control and Complexity, Leadership, Markets and the World

“Life is like a seesaw, a game where the movement and the excitement come from a balance of opposites, because it will always inevitably be full of paradox. I believe that the key to progress and even to survival in life and work is to be aware that contradictions can coexist, and to learn to live with them.”
― Rowan Gibson, Rethinking the Future: Rethinking Business Principles, Competition, Control and Complexity, Leadership, Markets and the World

“If we are going to make any sense out of all this confusion around us, we have to find a way to organize it in our minds, so that we can start to understand what is actually happening in the world and then try to do something about it. My way of doing this is to accept that there are never any simple or right answers to life, that life is full of contradictions and surprises, that it is, in fact, full of paradoxes. But if we can learn to understand and accept these paradoxes, then I believe that we can eventually find pathways through them. We can live with them and manage them.”
― Rowan Gibson, Rethinking the Future: Rethinking Business Principles, Competition, Control and Complexity, Leadership, Markets and the World

“The new leaders will not be content to sit back and let the cruise control do the driving. They will be looking forward, scanning the landscape, watching the competition, spotting emerging trends and new opportunities, avoiding impending crises. They will be explorers, adventurers, trailblazers. Advanced technology will give them an interactive, real-time connection with the marketplace; and they will get feedback from sensors at the peripheries of the organization. But they will be led just as much by their own intuition. Sometimes they will decide to ignore the data and drive by the seat of their pants. Tomorrow’s successful leaders will be what Warren Bennis calls ‘leaders of leaders’. They will decentralize power and democratize strategy by involving a rich mixture of different people from inside and outside the organization in the process of inventing the future.”
― Rowan Gibson, Rethinking the Future: Rethinking Business Principles, Competition, Control and Complexity, Leadership, Markets and the World

“In the twenty-first century, the winners will be those who stay ahead of the change curve, constantly redefining their industries, creating new markets, blazing new trails, reinventing the competitive rules, challenging the status quo. To use Charles Handy’s words, it will be those who ‘invent the world’, not those who respond to it. Of course, it requires far less effort to follow in the tracks of the leader than it does to find your own migration path to the future, and there was a time when this was an option. But not any more. Tomorrow’s global markets will show no mercy to the me-too crowd.”
― Rowan Gibson, Rethinking the Future: Rethinking Business Principles, Competition, Control and Complexity, Leadership, Markets and the World

“The fact is that the future will not be a continuation of the past. It will be a series of discontinuities. And only by accepting these discontinuities and doing something about them will we stand any chance of success and survival in the twenty-first century.”
― Rowan Gibson, Rethinking the Future: Rethinking Business Principles, Competition, Control and Complexity, Leadership, Markets and the World