Uncharted, Margaret Heffernan
Uncharted, Margaret Heffernan
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Uncharted
How to Navigate the Future

Author: Margaret Heffernan

Narrator: Margaret Heffernan

Unabridged: 10 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/22/2020


Synopsis

“Excellent (and very timely).” —Financial Times * “Smartly assembled case studies and insights.” —Publishers Weekly * A Financial Times Best Book of the Year

Former CEO and popular TED speaker Margaret Heffernan offers powerful and practical tools so you can face the future with confidence and courage.

Most of us are addicted to prediction, desperate for certainty about the future. But the complexity of modern life won’t provide that; experts in forecasting are reluctant to look more than 400 days out. History doesn’t repeat itself and even genetics won’t tell you everything you want to know. Tomorrow remains uncharted territory, but Margaret Heffernan demonstrates how we can push aside uncertainty and forge ahead with agility.

Drawing on a wide array of people and places, Uncharted traces long-term projects that shrewdly evolved over generations to meet the unpredictable challenges of every new age. Heffernan also looks at radical exercises and experiments that redefined standard practices by embracing different perspectives and testing fresh approaches. Preparing to confront a variable future provides the antidote to passivity and prediction.

Ranging freely through history and from business to science, government to friendships, this refreshing book challenges us to mine our own creativity and humanity for the capacity to create the futures we want and can believe in.

About Margaret Heffernan

Margaret Heffernan is an entrepreneur, chief executive, and author. She was born in Texas, raised in Holland, and educated at Cambridge University. She worked for the BBC and developed interactive multimedia products with Peter Lynch, Tom Peters, Standard & Poors, and The Learning Company. She has served as Chief Executive Officer for InfoMation Corporation, ZineZone Corporation, and iCAST Corporation. The author of Beyond MeasureWillful Blindness, and A Bigger Prize, among others, she blogs for HuffPostCBS Moneywatch, and Inc.com.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Laura on April 19, 2020

A timely read, about tackling uncertainty. A quick read because Heffernan has an engaging writing style. But I found it somewhat unsatisfying. The structure seemed incoherent and made the argument difficult to follow. She has conducted many interviews but it was not clear how these articulated with......more

Goodreads review by Joshua on October 17, 2020

It was pretty uncanny how the last chapter of the book talks about pandemic preparedness (it's actually a more optimistic take than how things panned out) even though the book was published in February of 2020. It even specifically mentions social intervention in relation to the 1918 flu and how MER......more

Goodreads review by Daniel on September 22, 2020

This book is about how to map the future together. 1. The future is unknowable. Even Super predictors are wrong a lot of times. Pundits perform even worse, and the more the fame, the worse the prediction. Even then, there is a huge market for predictions because humans crave certainty (even if it is......more

Goodreads review by Runsheng on December 21, 2021

A roller coaster ride of critical reasoning on battling and getting used to the certainty of the uncertain. The challenge for me is that Hefferman is playing devil’s advocate so hard her counter argument is arguing against her other counter argument 3 chapters ago. However, it’s a timely read for a......more

Goodreads review by Terry on March 17, 2021

When she gets in storytelling mode, about people, this author is a joy to hear. I read somewhere that this book started life as a collection of journalistic essays. That makes sense, if true. But if so I kinda wish it had stayed there. The material that is I suspect designed to knit these disparate......more


Quotes

"Entrepreneur, author, and management professor Margaret Heffernan is a naturally confident speaker, but her assertive delivery never upstages the power and flow of her thinking. Her crowd-pleasing performance is perfect for the kind of clever observations and intellectual sound bites that populate this guide to the unpredictable future. Yet the audio goes well beyond entertainment because, with her solid background in management science, it offers a highly useful guide to where civilization might be headed. Get ready, she says, for a world far more unpredictable than the experts want us to believe. Citing past economic predictions that have repeatedly been wrong, she promotes the skepticism, tolerance for ambiguity, and can-do spirit you'll need to keep your sanity in the unstable times ahead."