The Anticipatory Organization: Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage

by Daniel Burrus

Technology-driven change is accelerating at an exponential rate, but moving fast in the wrong direction will only get you into trouble faster! Reacting to problems and digital disruptions, no matter how agile you and your organization are, is no longer good enough. The Anticipatory Organization teaches you how to separate the Hard Trends that will happen, from the Soft Trends that might happen, allowing you to jump ahead with low risk and the confidence certainty can provide. Accelerate innovation and actively shape the future--before someone else does it for you! Digital transformation has divided us all into two the disruptor and the disrupted. The Anticipatory Organization gives you the tools you need to see disruption before it happens, allowing you to turn change into advantage. In The Anticipatory Organization , Burrus shows us that the future is far more certain than we realize, and finding certainty in an uncertain world provides a big advantage for those who know how and where to look for it. Inspired by the dramatic results that organizations are experiencing from his award-winning learning system, The Anticipatory Organization offers a comprehensive way to identify game-changing opportunities. Using the principles of this proven model, you will learn how to elevate planning, accelerate innovation, and transform results by pinpointing and acting upon enormous opportunities waiting to be discovered. Readers will learn how - Separate the Hard Trends that will happen from the Soft Trends that might happen
- Anticipate disruptions, problems, and game-changing opportunities
- Identify and pre-solve predictable problems
- Accelerate innovation (both everyday innovation and exponential innovation)
- Pinpoint and act upon enormous untapped opportunities
​- Skip problems and barriers to succeed faster

Genres: Business, Nonfiction, Leadership, Buisness

216 pages, Hardcover

Published October 10, 2017

About the author

Daniel Burrus is considered one of the world’s leading futurists on global trends and innovation. The New York Times has referred to him as one of the top three business gurus in the highest demand as a speaker.

He is a strategic advisor to executives from Fortune 500 companies, helping them to develop game-changing strategies based on his proven methodologies for capitalizing on technology innovations and their future impact. His client list includes companies such as Microsoft, GE, American Express, Google, Toshiba, Procter & Gamble, Honda, and IBM.

He is the author of six books, including The New York Times and Wall
Street Journal best-seller Flash Foresight: How To See The Invisible and Do The Impossible, as well as the international best-seller Technotrends.

He is also a featured writer on the topics of innovation, change and the future for Harvard Business Review, Wired, CNBC, and Huffington Post to name a few.

He has been the featured subject of several PBS television specials and has appeared on programs such as CNN, Fox Business, and Bloomberg, and is quoted in a variety of publications, including The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Fortune, and Forbes.

He has founded six businesses, three of which were national leaders in the United States in the first year. He is the CEO of Burrus Research, a research and consulting firm that monitors global advancements in technology driven trends to help clients profit from technological, social and business forces that are converging to create enormous, untapped opportunities.

His accurate predictions date back to the early 1980s where he became the first and only futurist to accurately identify the twenty technologies that would become the driving force of business and economic change for decades to come. Since then, he has continued to establish a worldwide reputation for his exceptional record of predicting the future of technology driven change and its direct impact on the business world.

Specialties: Technology-Driven Trends, Strategic Innovation, Strategic Advising and Planning, Business Keynote Presentations

Reviews

[Todd Davidson · Rating 2 out of 5]

TLDR: “I’m the author and I’m awesome, here’s a bunch of anecdotes, rules of thumb, and tropes.” Some of this book was good but the good stuff in here can be found in other better books.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

Change in the modern world seems to be happening faster each year. We have had Moore’s Law which predicted the rate of change in computing power and speed, and with the increase in processing power in smartphones, the modern office is in your pocket now. Emails fire at you all hours of the day, instant messaging software is constantly chirping and your notifications from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are getting silly. In amongst all these distractions, there are big changes happening in the world and if you miss them as a business then you are definitely going to be up the creek without a paddle.

In The Anticipatory Organization, Daniel Burrus teaches us to separate what he calls Hard Trends, things that are almost certainly going to happen and cannot avoid, such as regulation technological advancement, climate change, from Soft Trends, which are events that might happen but on the other hand might not. Understanding the difference between them and comprehending the impact on your business is critical. It enables you to expect the unexpected and turn change into a business advantage. There are a two other concepts that he introduces, one of which is quite revolutionary, which is to actually skip a problem, and come back to it at a point later in time; mad as it may sound, it often means that the problem that seemed huge and urgent at the time when looked at later is much less of an issue. The other concept is Futureview; as Burrus' states, you cannot shape your future whilst still looking at your past achievements, instead you need to be looking at technologies and products that disrupt and innovate to be able to make your business a success tomorrow and beyond.

Overall an interesting book on a new way of looking at ways of changing businesses by properly analysing the trends going on in the world and exploiting the gaps that other businesses have missed.

[Elite Group · Rating 3 out of 5]

An interesting book on revitalising your organisation

Change in the modern world seems to be happening faster each year. We have had Moore’s Law which predicted the rate of change in computing power and speed, and with the increase in processing power in smartphones, the modern office is in your pocket now. Emails fire at you all hours of the day; instant messaging software is constantly chirping and your notifications from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook are getting silly. In amongst all these distractions, there are big changes happening in the world and if you miss them as a business then you are definitely going to be up to the creek without a paddle.

In The Anticipatory Organization, Daniel Burrus teaches us to separate what he calls Hard Trends, things that are almost certainly going to happen and cannot avoid, such as regulation technological advancement, climate change etc, from Soft Trends, which are events that might happen but on the other hand might not. Understanding the difference between them and comprehending the impact on your business is critical. It enables you to expect the unexpected and turn change into a business advantage. There are also two other concepts that he introduces, one of which is quite revolutionary, which is to actually skip a problem, and come back to it at a point later in time; mad as it may sound, it often means that the problem that seemed huge and urgent at the time when looked at later is much less of an issue. The other concept is Futureview; as Burrus states, you cannot shape your future whilst still looking at your past achievements, instead, you need to be looking at technologies and products that disrupt and innovate to be able to make your business a success tomorrow and beyond.

Overall an interesting book on a new way of looking at ways of changing businesses by properly analysing the trends going on in the world and exploiting the gaps that other businesses have missed.

Paul

Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review

[Renwick · Rating 4 out of 5]

For the majority of people that pick up this book and read it, the content will make sense and the reader will relate to the message contained within. The real beneficiaries will be those that take action based on the concepts laid out by Daniel Burrus. It is no longer sufficient to keep up with the pack, even though the pace of change has quickened considerably in everyday life. We are all stakeholders in this new age and the message is clear; Know what's next, Develop opportunities, Shape the future and Accelerate success. If you don't, someone will. This is a thought-provoking read, which makes a great deal of sense and I would recommend it to anyone who wants to contribute to the success of their organisation.
Thanks to Netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review.

[Shelhorowitzgreenmkt · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few years ago, I reviewed Burrus’s earlier book, Flash Foresight. This book revisits that territory and expands from it. While aimed at large corporations, much of his advice holds for small businesses, including solopreneurs like me—even if we don’t have the kinds of financial and logistical resources big companies can throw at a problem. Note: I am using his preferred capitalization.

His main theses?

1. If we divide our forecasting into inevitable Hard Trends (e.g., Baby Boomers are aging out of the workforce and into eldercare services) and malleable Soft Trends (Boomers take their hard-won knowledge with them as they exit), we will know how to both anticipate and be ready for the inevitable changes and consider whether we want to impact the soft ones—such as creating a way to capture that soon-to-be-lost experience-based knowledge through the exit process.

2. Checking whether we are using Hard (data-based) or Soft (gut-based) Assumptions can help avoid disaster. Trends based on Hard Assumptions are much more likely to come true.

3. Many of the disruptions are caused by three technology trends: faster processing speed, higher bandwidth, and better/more storage. Others are caused by the changing relationships these tech trends enable.

4. Even though phones, tablets, and personal computers might face hardware limitations, these three trends allow us to push more tasks out to the cloud—which has, for practical purposes, no such limitations.

5. Disruptive approaches can be created and harnessed by “Opportunity Managers” who can spot the possibilities and ride the exponential curves. And if you don’t disrupt, someone else will (p.129).

6. Be a contrarian. Innovate instead of competing. Choose to be extraordinary every day and ask the questions an extraordinary person would ask (p. 157). Skip the obvious problems and anticipate/plan for the deeper ones so you can turn them into opportunities—especially when you see the low-hanging fruit others aren’t noticing. Zag when others zig.

I would add one more to his three megatrends: exponentially better ease of use. That, in turn, democratizes the technology. Ease of use takes something out of the realm of engineers in lab coats and puts it into the pockets of ordinary people, even kids. Compare a DOS interface from the 1990s (or worse, a punch card-driven mainframe of the 1970s) with the few simple, well-labeled icons on a smart phone—WOW! My first experience going online was CompuServe, in 1987. Not only did we have to use command-line prompts, we had to deal with 10-digit all-numeral user names—so we never knew who was writing to us. And my creakingly slow 300-bps modem connection was very balky, so I was constantly getting thrown off. After a couple of months, I gave up. Now, nine-year-olds and ninety-nine-year-olds can get online with a few clicks.

And this means that any of us—a preschooler, a solopreneur, someone just learning a written language—can become a disrupter and harness the early-mover advantage. Even as a home-office solopreneur, I disrupted the local portion of an industry all by myself, back in 1984, after buying my first computer (an original 128K Mac). At that time, my business focused on typing term papers with some resume writing—using an involved process of interviewing the client, writing and editing a draft, having the client approve the wording, and then typing a final, formatted copy. Suddenly, I could do the whole thing in one shift. I put a little half-inch in-column ad in the Yellow Pages reading “Affordable Professional Resumes While You Wait.” Clients loved the speed, quality, and low price. Within about a year, it was the biggest part of my business—for a decade. And after that success, each time I switched my focus again, I looked for an approach that was at least a bit disruptive and different from what everyone else was doing: from popularizing “story-behind-the-story” press releases in the 1990s to staking my position around the idea that business can profit from building deep environmental and social responsibility into core products and services, which has been my core mission for almost a decade now.

Be sure to read Appendix A, a list of 25 principles in the book, and Appendix B, an expanded glossary that serves like an alphabetically organized Cliff Notes; they come after the acknowledgements and author bio, but before the thorough index. These two together will deeply reinforce the learning. Appendix C is about his video program.

[Steve Brown · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turn Disruption and Change into Opportunity and Advantage

Liked this book. Thought it tied in with the Innovator's Dilemma


We often deny that things are predicable beyond death and taxes, but in reality we can predict the tides and know when NYE will be.


The Anticipatory Organization Model


Knows what is next (transition planning)

Accelerate Success Develop Opportunities
(Transform Results) (Transform Innovation)


Shape the Future (Transform Culture)





Hard Trends - Is a hard fact that can provide us with certainty. They fall into 3 categories:

Technology - virtualization, AI, data analytics are all growing and are not just fads
Demographics - there are 80 million baby boomers who will have predictable problems (knees, eyes, heart, etc.)
Government Regulations -there will be more cyber security…


Soft Trends - is a future maybe or projection that appear to be based on stats but are really based on assumptions
Stock Market
Housing Market
Obesity


Three Digital Accelerators
Computing Power
Bandwidth
Digital Storage


Think Both/and not Either/Or
We don't have to kill off the old to embrace the new (people buy CDs still, just not at the same rate. Ditto magazines. Credit cards instead of paying via phone, etc.)

Keep Your Antenna Up.
If you're not looking for connections and ideas you won't see them. Like the guy who didn't see how automated cars would affect his drivers' ed courses.
Change, can be good if you embrace it or bad if you let it pass you by. Think Kodak, Blackberry, etc.

8 Hard Trend Pathways to Innovation
Dematerialization - reduced size adds value (smaller phone, laptop, car, etc.)
Virtualization - replace credit cards, CDs, etc.
Mobility make hardware portable like ipods, laptops, etc.
Intelligence - ai and the internet allow us to have more information at our fingertips.
Networking expand the number of connections, bandwidth, people, etc.
Interactivity making our media dynamic (touch screens, etc.)
Globalization - people and products travelling and working together
Convergence - merge features together (like a camera on a phone or radio built into a car)


ANTICIPATORY ORGANIZATION
Capacity Disciplined Opportunists Confident Accelerators ***
outcomes moving efficiently in the Outcome certainty brings you the
Wrong direction will get you in trouble faster Confidence to innovate, drive strategic velocity
And elevate performance
Of Busy Reactors Marginal Innovators
Outcome you will be surprised by the future Innovate products and service with inconsistent
That others have shaped for you. Quality, higher costs, and marginal performance
Execution
Degree Of Risk



Skip it to find the real problem (find the real problem, not always the first problem.)
Example furniture warehouse thought they needed more space but really just needed to send to stores sooner
Second example was tractor salesmen weren't selling packages.
Why? Not because they were bad, but the dealers got lower margins and weren't incentivized to sell the packages. Needed to reward proper behavior.

Conduct a pre-mortem - identify risks before we start so we can build in a better solution

Don't just take the time to work in your business. Take the time to work on your business (stop to think, evaluate, and plan)

Either be the Disruptor or the Disrupted. - If it can be done, it will be done. If you don't do it, someone else will.

[Adam Rabiner · Rating 3 out of 5]

Handed out at a NYC Cash Management conference for treasury professionals, The Anticipatory Organization was my subway reading for a week. The book, about anticipating disruption in a time of exponential technological and business change, rather than be waylaid by it, lays out a framework, a trademarked system known as the Anticipatory Organization (AO) model. The book is the static part to whet an organization's appetite. A web-based inter-active program is soft sold in the final chapter. Without going into too much detail AO involves concepts known as Hard and Soft Trends; Laws of Opposites; Future, Present, and Past Mindsets; etc. As someone who is charged in my organization with forward thinking, automation, business process improvement with an eye to new technologies, these pages were particularly relevant. Much of what Burrus writes makes sense, one might argue even obvious. But the fates of companies such as Blackberry, Kodak, Dell, and others which failed to see, plan for, and take advantage of disruption (he argues they had a Past or at best Present Mindset) suggest that these lessons have not always been learned well or implemented by business leaders. Nevertheless, there is something quite fluffy about this book, and one might argue many business books with "proven" techniques. It felt like the reading equivalent of eating cotton candy. I was digesting something but what it was seemed to melt away almost immediately. One concept is quickly introduced, perhaps illustrated with a brief and not particularly detailed example, and then he moves on to the next concept. It's easy to forget what some of his pithy, patented techniques mean, even a few pages on. I found myself drawing a blank at one point when he was referring to The Law of Opposites. Perhaps that is why he includes Appendix B, a Definition of Principles and Key Terms. There is also quite a lot of repetition. This is a quick and fast book. But honestly, since so much of what he says is repetitive, what he has to say could have been said in half as many pages. The infomercial plug for www.AnticipatoryOrganization.com at the end is gratuitous. But Burrus is, if nothing else, an entrepreneur. So give the man his due. The book can add some value to anyone who wants to have greater control over their career and harness, not be overwhelmed by, our kinetically transforming world.

[V. Stoica · Rating 4 out of 5]

Daniel Burrus' "The Anticipatory Organization" equips leaders to navigate constant disruption. His framework, built on understanding inevitable and influential changes, empowers proactive decision-making.

This practical book equips readers with tools to identify emerging trends, assess their impact, and formulate agile responses. Burrus emphasizes building an "anticipatory culture" of continuous learning and adaptation.

He reframes disruption as a catalyst for innovation and growth, challenging leaders to view change as an opportunity.

While the book's optimism may not resonate with everyone, its message is clear: Anticipating and adapting are crucial for success.

Ideal for:

● Seasoned Executives
● Emerging Leaders
● Change Agents

"The Anticipatory Organization" is a must-read for those committed to thriving in a world of change.

[Nag Jayaraman · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some ideas like validating trends are good but book itself is too light to fit the title. Reading through fines the feel of dealing with book factory production - great title; professional speaker/professor with content for a long lecture - well produce a book seem to be template.

[Ryan Purvis · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good model

This is a good summary of a South African concept ‘n Boer maak ‘n plan or a farmer makes a plan - work with what you have, think ahead and plan for the future.

[Manoj Joshi · Rating 5 out of 5]

A great text on anticipatory framework , must read for all those anticipating uncertainty and complexity in an organisation... Daniel intelligently manoeuvres your critical thinking

[Enrique Romero · Rating 5 out of 5]

At the rate of change in today's world, the knowledge in this book will help you anticipate and remain relevant.

[Roy Saunderson]

Excellent book to get your head around predicting the future and preparing for it in business.