Powerful Times: Rising to the Challenge of Our Uncertain World

Eamonn Kelly
September 2005

We’re not just living through an "age of change." We’re experiencing a change of age: the most profound inflection point in human history since the Enlightenment.

That’s the thesis of Eamonn Kelly’s remarkable new book, Powerful Times. From terrorism and nuclear proliferation to emerging technologies that could change the nature of humanity to the rise of new and innovative economic powers, Kelly weaves together seven powerful "dynamic tensions" that will fundamentally reshape human life in the coming decades. Kelly offers breakthrough insights into how these tensions will conflict and interact to create huge waves of change beyond anything we’ve seen before. Using scenario thinking techniques pioneered at Royal Dutch/Shell and nurtured at Global Business Network, Kelly evokes the different futures that might unfold as a result of the interplay of these dynamic tensions and the profound implications for society and business. Whether you’re an executive, strategist, entrepreneur, policymaker, or citizen, this book delivers actionable insights of incomparable breadth and depth. Use it to understand and prepare for what’s comingand to transform this moment of uncertainty and complexity into unprecedented opportunity.Among the themes explored:

• Paradoxes of power in an age of terror: Unprecedented dilemmas for the world’s only superpower
• Unexpected consequences of transparency: Ubiquitous information bring new clarity but also confusion, conspiracies, and craziness
• The virtual and tangible economies: Economic value is increasingly intangible, even as physical infrastructure matters more
• Technology acceleration and pushback: Computing, biotech, nanotech: breakthroughs, catastrophes, or both?
• New forms of governance: The resurgence of local and global innovations in democracy
• The widening human footprint: The impact of 9 billion people on an increasingly challenged planet
  

For more information or to purchase the book please visit the Powerful Times website.

Eamonn Kelly is CEO of Global Business Network and a partner of the Monitor Group. He has consulted at a senior level to dozens of the world’s leading corporations, to governments, and to philanthropic foundations and is the co-author of What’s Next: Exploring the New Terrain for Business (Perseus/Wiley, 2002) and The Future of the Knowledge Economy (OECD, 1999).
Powerful Times Table of Contents