Eamonn Kelly is CEO of Global Business Network (GBN), the renowned California-based, future-oriented network and consulting firm, and a partner of the Monitor Group. He has been central to sustaining GBN’s thought leadership about the future and is head of its consulting practice.
When explaining why he wrote this book, Kelly observes: “Our world is increasingly complex and confusing, a crazy kaleidoscope of important but ambiguous dynamics from the worlds of politics, technology, economics, and culture–amplified but not necessarily clarified, by a ubiquitous yet partial global media....Our times demand that we make diversity and multiplicity a virtue, that we bridge divides, make connections, and find alignments and points of commonality–even as our differences frighten us, our ideologies polarize us, and our enemies enrage us (and this is as true within countries and regions as it is between them). Our times demand that we think long term, imagine the futures that we may be creating today, and prepare for the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.”
Of special interest is Kelley’s thought of “dynamic tensions” which exacerbate the complexity and confusion to which he refers in the Preface, specifically, those between clarity and craziness, secular and sacred, power and vulnerability, technology acceleration and pushback, intangible and physical economics, prosperity and decline, and finally, people and planet. Kelly suggests that, over time, the human race “will begin to understand the profound autonomy of the planet–its long cycles of change and transformation that occur independently of our presence and our actions. We will then reach a collective realization that is more ancient wisdom than modern worldview–that the planet does not belong to us but we belong to it, and it will survive and change no matter what we do, while the opposite may not be true.” Therefore it is important to recognize and then track the big, contextual forces that are reshaping the world today. These are “powerful times” because of such forces that create the aforementioned “dynamic tensions.” “How can we possibly try to make sense of the future when the present is so profoundly perplexing?” One of the most important portions of Kelly’s response to that question is provided in Part 4, Chapter 12, when he discusses what he calls “the new realities of business” at a time when, of all the changes during thus turbulent era, “one of the most significant is certainly the interconnectedness and interdependence of every part of the world.” That is to say, “no place, no country, no person, and no organization stand entirely alone in any sphere.”
Kelly asserts, that we must aspire to “both a more profound understanding of and a shared commitment to sustain and nurture this shared global commons...but it would be naive to think that this will prove straightforward.” Specifically, we must be willing “to believe in the scale of issues confronting us while the evidence is mounting but before it is conclusive–in other words, before it is too late.” In addition, “we must match our new global reality with a new global empathy, based on an acknowledgment that we have never been more interdependent and our interests have never been more inseparable.”
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