![]() ![]() He knew from experience that CDs inspired fans to come to live concerts. ![]() Why was Peter Gabriel right and the planners wrong? Gabriel knew the buyers-the market. Sure enough: digital piracy is now well-nigh universal, but Taylor Swift’s next concert tour is slated to generate over one billion. Let them make copies! It would serve as advertising to boost live performances. Why would the public buy CDs when they could just copy them? CD sales would crash, and the music industry would follow. Discussing the impact of the new CD technology, planners assumed disaster. Schwartz stresses the need to bring in “remarkable people.” He mentions a consultant he once brought in whom some of us may recognize-Peter Gabriel. Of course, cultivating multiple perspectives doesn’t mean wallowing in them randomly. Every time that principle was violated, disaster followed. Perhaps they yet will, but Schwartz’ experience counsels us, on the contrary, to cultivate many views, many perspectives. We seem, foolishly, to be moving into an era of greater censorship and information management from above, in the questionable belief that social harmony will result. How many bad decisions are made because no other options are presented? In every fall his consultancy took, says Schwartz, “We were talking to ourselves,” adding that “There must be someone to challenge the consensus for you.” Rather, lack of intellectual diversity, an absence of a diversity of points of view. Schwartz condenses decades of experience in scenario planning into a few crisp observations brimming with optimism and practicality.Īt one point Schwartz says that every false trend he mistakenly spotted, every major predictive failure, stemmed from one single cause: lack of diversity.īut by lack of diversity he doesn’t mean a lack of the Woke diversity everywhere in the news today. ![]() I can think of no video that aligns so perfectly with my own way of thinking about the subject. As Senior Vice President of Strategic Planning and Chief Futures Officer at, Schwartz is far from unknown by the business community, but corporate leaders come and go: only books live forever, and Schwartz’ lasting claim to fame will always be his authorship of the celebrated The Art of the Long View: Planning for the Future in an Uncertain World, the founding text on scenario planning for modern businesses. I found his essay thoughtful and inspirational, and I commend it to you.I don’t often recommend YouTube videos to my readers, but some are just too good to ignore: in particular, every business person should take a moment to watch the interview between David Bach and the iconic father of modern day scenario planning, Peter Schwartz. We are “free people, worthy of freedom, and determined not only to remain so but to help others gain their freedom as well.” And Richard notes, "That’s not a bad starting point for locating American identity in the world of 2019." “What kind of people do we think we are?” Reagan asked in 1982. Richard revisits one of great speeches from President Reagan's early years - and his reflections on it are worth reading at a time when our political and economic systems are being called into question, not just at home but around the world. This exceptional essay by Richard Fontaine, CEO of CNAS and a former senior advisor to Senator McCain, among others in government, stood out. I spent time this past weekend going through some speeches and articles from recent months.
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