The 500 Year Delta: What Happens After What Comes Next

Though 1997 seems like a lifetime ago and a completely different market ago, this book shares insights into who we have become as a society of consumers and purveyors. A clear and concise picture of where our society and economy have been and where we are headed. The author is a very interesting fellow and an amazing speaker. Buy the book and attend one of his speaking engagements. If you don't learn something from both...well...perhaps you're dead. Seriously, this is a great book.

What a book! Anyone looking for Answers or to know what the future will be need not apply. The author's whole point is that there are no answers, and we have to manage our way through the paradoxes as best we can. This is important, unfortunately this point is not always clear in the text - sometimes one is left hanging, wondering whether a question has been asked or a statement made. (hence the lost point, chaps) Maybe I just don't translate American all that well, being English and divided only by language! What Paradoxes? Things are getting bigger. And smaller. Things are going faster. And slower. Things are going global. And local. So the key is to know your self (a point they do make) and this puts me in mind of a quote I read (and can't find so I'll misquote it if I may:- "Give me the strength to change the things I need to change, the perserverence to put up with the things I can't change and the wisdom to know the difference." I am also intrigued by the 'back to the future' angle the authors use - 'futurists better be good historians' sounds like another paradox to me. Overall a good read - a waypoint on the journey with a few good hints and tips. Some other waypoints I have found on mine- Having a few good heros helps (strangely there are not many of these in this in the book) - so check out Horatio Nelson (Christopher Hibbert) - how can one so flawed become so great? The Art of War by Sun Tzu (full text is on the net), I have a printed version with a forward by James Clavell - again notable in its absence. Built to Last (Collins & Porrass - two more Stanford Alumini) which treats the Paradox question as a dualistic concept from Chinese religious philosophy (!). Bon Voyage!

Making sense of our world, never an easy or a completed task (our pretensions regarding the latter notwithstanding!), just got substantially easier with the appearance of The 500 Year Delta. The book works on several levels, not the least of which is its utility as a survival guide to the new ways and definitions of work and relationships which await us as our separate rivers dump us into the roiling, clear-as-mud, yet nutriemt-rich waters of that Delta. The authors' uncommon sense (e.g., that corporations will have embassies, not governmets; that governments' chief values will be to effect transfer payments and provide entertainment, etc.) hit at the very foundations of our value systems. They are, nonetheless, cogently and coherently conceived and presented. Accepting their theses will lead the reader along seemingly tortuous paths, and will require several iterations of what the literary critics used to term the "willing suspension of disbelief." Those suspensions will be frequent, and some will be of serious length. Particularly challenging will be the authors' insistence that the utility of reason has played itself out, and their consigning of hierarchies to the dustbin of history. A must read for those of us in government service (an emerging oxymoron?), but not recommended for those therein in management positions!

Like Tom Peters, the authors describe how profoundly different the workplace is today, and how new, surprising behavior can lead to success in today's chaotic business world. But in the last few things I've read by him, Peters has digressed into a self-consiously hip attitude without much underneath. Taylor and Wacker are on a quest for enlightenment in the style of the 60s and 70s -- mixing a hefty dose of spirituality in with business prescriptions/descriptions. I believe in the sincerity of these guys. They've lived through a lot, evidently, yet keep a sense of wonder and appreciation for the things we're living through as the millenium approaches.

Unlike other Futurist books, this one gives enough to get you thinking without spoiling the conclusion. Seeing as the future is what we make it, this book will allow the reader to take many mental excursions into the possibilities ahead