Is your business ready for the future? Scenario planning is a fascinating, yet still underutilized, business tool that can be of immense value to a company's strategic planning process. It allows companies to visualize the impact that a portfolio of possible futures could have on their competitiveness. It helps decision-makers see opportunities and threats that could emerge beyond their normal planning horizon. Scenario Planning serves as a guide to taking a long-term look at your business, your industry, and the world, posing thoughtful questions about the possible consequences of some current (and possible future) trends. This book will help you: Outline (and help you prepare for) any trends that could play out in the future that could change the political, social, and economic landscapes and significantly impact your business Explore the impact of technological advances and the emergence of new competitors to your business Examine challenges that are only dimly recognizable as potential problems today This visual book will help you answer this question: Is my organization ready for every possibility?

"The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic marks the most significant, singular global disruption since World War II, with health, economic, political, and security implications that will ripple for years to come." -Global Trends 2040 (2021) Global Trends 2040-A More Contested World (2021), released by the US National Intelligence Council, is the latest report in its series of reports starting in 1997 about megatrends and the world's future. This report, strongly influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic, paints a bleak picture of the future and describes a contested, fragmented and turbulent world. It specifically discusses the four main trends that will shape tomorrow's world: - Demographics-by 2040, 1.4 billion people will be added mostly in Africa and South Asia. - Economics-increased government debt and concentrated economic power will escalate problems for the poor and middleclass. - Climate-a hotter world will increase water, food, and health insecurity. - Technology-the emergence of new technologies could both solve and cause problems for human life. Students of trends, policymakers, entrepreneurs, academics, journalists and anyone eager for a glimpse into the next decades, will find this report, with colored graphs, essential reading.

Democracy is in crisis. Is there still time to save it? Democracies face external threat from aggressive authoritarian states. Internally, citizens have grown increasingly distrustful of politicians and more cynical about national and global governance institutions. The time is ripe for democracy to renew itself. This text offers a state-of-the art overview of democratic innovations today, moving beyond cries of the 'death' or 'end' of democracy to instead offer a range of practical solutions for how to save it and restore faith in democratic practice. 'Old' democratic power, represented by existing structures, is being challenged. 'New' power involves collaboration and rapid feedback loops, as well as increased citizen participation. The future of democracy, the authors demonstrate, will be about findings ways of melding 'old' and 'new' power practices. Offering a broad and accessible survey of what different forms of democracy and democratic innovations look like today, and how they can develop in future, Saving Democracy shows us the potential for transformation across the entire democratic process. Avoiding a reductive focus on simply getting citizens more involved in decision-making, this book uniquely argues for the importance of refining and monitoring how democratic decisions are made and followed through.

New York Times Bestseller COVID-19 is speeding up history, but how? What is the shape of the world to come? Lenin once said, "There are decades when nothing happens and weeks when decades happen." This is one of those times when history has sped up. CNN host and best-selling author Fareed Zakaria helps readers to understand the nature of a post-pandemic world: the political, social, technological, and economic consequences that may take years to unfold. Written in the form of ten "lessons," covering topics from natural and biological risks to the rise of "digital life" to an emerging bipolar world order, Zakaria helps readers to begin thinking beyond the immediate effects of COVID-19. Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World speaks to past, present, and future, and, while urgent and timely, is sure to become an enduring reflection on life in the early twenty-first century.

NIC 2008-003. November 2008. Global Trends 2025 is the fourth installment in the National Intelligence Council-led effort to identify key drivers and developments likely to shape world events a decade or more in the future. It offers a fresh look at how key global trends might develop over the next 15 years to influence world events. The primary goal is to provide US policymakers with a view of how world developments could evolve, identifying opportunities and potentially negative developments that might warrant policy action.

Governments, businesses, and individuals around the world are thinking about what happens after the COVID-19 pandemic. Can we hope to not only ward off another COVID-like disaster but also eliminate all respiratory diseases, including the flu? Bill Gates, one of our greatest and most effective thinkers and activists, believes the answer is yes. The author of the #1 New York Times best seller How to Avoid a Climate Disaster lays out clearly and convincingly what the world should have learned from COVID-19 and what all of us can do to ward off another catastrophe like it. Relying on the shared knowledge of the world’s foremost experts and on his own experience of combating fatal diseases through the Gates Foundation, Gates first helps us understand the science of infectious diseases. Then he shows us how the nations of the world, working in conjunction with one another and with the private sector, how we can prevent a new pandemic from killing millions of people and devastating the global economy. Here is a clarion call—strong, comprehensive, and of the gravest importance.

Leading global experts, brought together by Johns Hopkins University, discuss national and international trends in a post-COVID-19 world. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has killed hundreds of thousands of people and infected millions while also devastating the world economy. The consequences of the pandemic, however, go much further: they threaten the fabric of national and international politics around the world. As Henry Kissinger warned, "The coronavirus epidemic will forever alter the world order." What will be the consequences of the pandemic, and what will a post-COVID world order look like? No institution is better suited to address these issues than Johns Hopkins University, which has convened experts from within and outside of the university to discuss world order after COVID-19. In a series of essays, international experts in public health and medicine, economics, international security, technology, ethics, democracy, and governance imagine a bold new vision for our future. Essayists include: Graham Allison, Anne Applebaum, Philip Bobbitt, Hal Brands, Elizabeth Economy, Jessica Fanzo, Henry Farrell, Peter Feaver, Niall Ferguson, Christine Fox , Jeremy A. Greene, Hahrie Han, Kathleen H. Hicks, William Inboden, Tom Inglesby, Jeffrey P. Kahn, John Lipsky, Margaret MacMillan, Anna C. Mastroianni, Lainie Rutkow, Kori Schake, Eric Schmidt, Thayer Scott, Benn Steil, Janice Gross Stein, James B. Steinberg, Johannes Urpelainen, Dora Vargha, Sridhar Venkatapuram, and Thomas Wright. In collaboration with and appreciation of the book's co-editors, Professors Hal Brands and Francis J. Gavin of the Johns Hopkins SAIS Henry A. Kissinger Center for Global Affairs, Johns Hopkins University Press is pleased to donate funds to the Maryland Food Bank, in support of the university's food distribution efforts in East Baltimore during this period of food insecurity due to COVID-19 pandemic hardships.

In the early 1990s, people predicted the death of privacy, an end to the current concept of 'property,' a paperless society, 500 channels of high-definition interactive television, world peace, and the extinction of the human race after a takeover engineered by intelligent machines. Imagining the Internet zeroes in on predictions about the Internet's future and revisits past predictions—and how they turned out. It gives the history of communications in a nutshell, illustrating the serious impact of pervasive networks and how they will change our lives over the next century.