Flash Foresight
How to See the Invisible and Do the Impossible
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New York Times bestseller
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Wall Street Journal bestseller
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Amazon #1 bestseller
I’ve worked on a lot of books in the past decade. I don’t think any has been quite as fascinating a project as this.
Back in the early months of 2006, when my super-agent Margret McBride and I had just recently met (this was well more than a year before The Go-Giver was published), Margret introduced me to a friend of hers, an extraordinary man named Daniel Burrus.
Dan is one of the world’s leading technology forecasters and business strategists. He flies all over the world consulting to Fortune 100 firms, governments, school systems and associations. I don’t know anyone who travels more—or who is as influential. He is one of the most popular speakers in the National Speakers Association, and has been wowing people for a quarter-century, both with his enormously entertaining talks (think Buckminster Fuller meets Steve Martin) and his uncanny knack for accurate trend forecasting.
We started talking. And talking. And, you guessed it … talking. A few years passed, and Dan has become one of my greatest friends as well as one of my most rewarding writing partnerships.
And then—a book emerged! The subtitle says it all: How to see the invisible and do the impossible. That’s Dan in a nutshell.
Foreign Language Editions
Now also available in these foreign-language editions: Chinese simplified (modern), Chinese complex (traditional), German, Korean, Russian, and Portuguese. (Clicking on any cover will take you to the site where you can order that edition.)
Flash Foresight Reviews
“A welcome jolt of optimism.”
— Kirkus Reviews
“The ability to see trends and identify future opportunities is a skill anyone can benefit from, and Burrus’s latest work is a valuable introduction to the fundamentals.”
— Publishers Weekly
“A brilliant blueprint for mapping the problems and solutions both of the present and the future … one of the best business books to be written in a long time.”
— Business Lexington
“Dan Burrus has a rare knack for technology predictions that provide us with a blueprint for change in the business world. Flash Foresight is the quintessential guide for emerging enterprises looking for what is next in a world full of innovations … A well-articulated tome of how learned behaviors can keep us a bit ahead of the curve in terms of navigating profitable, productive and strategically aligned ideas for business success. … Exquisitely well-informed, and accessible to both experienced business leaders and curious neophytes.”
— Comstock’s
“Full of provocative insights and powerful strategies from a veteran entrepreneur.”
— Steve Forbes, CEO of Forbes Inc.
“Superbly written and thoroughly researched … uniquely effective strategies to grow personally as well as professionally.”
— Stephen R. Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
“I love this book! It’s as much fun to read as it is inspiring to learn from.”
— Alan M. Webber, co-founder of Fast Company
“Will change the way you think about your current obstacles and open your mind to limitless new opportunities.”
— Terry Jones, founder Travelocity.com & Chairman of Kayak.com
“After reading Flash Foresight and applying the principles to our business, in less than a year we have been able to double our revenues and increase the value of our company by a factor of four.”
— Arnie Bellini, CEO of ConnectWise
“A powerful competitive weapon that cuts through the clutter … shows you what you need to do to survive and thrive in the challenging times that lie ahead.”
— Rear Admiral David Bill III, USN (Ret.)
“A revolutionary book that offers the insights and strategies leaders will need to profit from the transformational times ahead.”
— Marshall Goldsmith, What Got You Here Won’t Get You There
“A must-read for any executive who chooses to play big and not settle for incremental improvement.”
— Roxanne Emmerich, Thank God It’s Monday!
Excerpt from Flash Foresight
Something gave Dale Morgen a big idea.
Like most of us, Dale was concerned about the rising cost of energy, the problems of environmental pollution and climate change, and the politics of petroleum. Like most of us, he also knew that the nuclear-power alternative creates its own problems, including radioactive waste and the nagging threat of a catastrophic accident, not to mention the possibility of theft and nuclear terrorism.
However, unlike most of us, Dale is an accomplished inventor with more than thirty wildly successful patents under his belt. In the course of his work he has honed a certain skill, and that skill is the something that gave him his big idea. I call it flash foresight, and the purpose of this book is to show you how it works so you can use it, too, in your career and in your life.
Flash foresight uses the data of your five senses, as well as that intuitive sixth sense we all have that some call a gut feeling or hunch. But flash foresight goes further, because in using it you synthesize those sensory and intuitive faculties and project them forward through the dimension of time. A flash foresight is a blinding flash of the future obvious. It is an intuitive grasp of the foreseeable future that, once you see it, reveals hidden opportunities and allows you to solve your biggest problems—before they happen. Flash foresight will allow anyone to both see and shape his future.
I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know instinctively. You’ve had flash foresights; we all have. They are those fleeting glimpses we sometimes have of where things might be heading. Have you ever said, “I knew I should have done that,” or “I knew that would happen”? That’s hindsight, and it happens because you don’t typically know ahead of time when your hunch is accurate and when it’s not. Learning how to make that distinction—between glimpses of the future that are reliable foresight, and those that are simply hunches—is what this book is about. Flash foresight is a sensibility, a skill you can develop, refine, and strengthen. I’ll show you how it works and how you can make it work for you on a regular basis.
Through the pages of Flash Foresight, we’ll look at real people with real problems who have discovered how to find real solutions. We’ll see how hundreds of overworked critical care nurses were able to add more than three hours of free time into their impossibly busy days; how a struggling urban school district found a way to generate the income to pay for its own endangered programs—without having to spend a dime; and how a phone company is transforming the social and economic landscape of Africa by doing something its American competitors never thought of. We’ll look at dozens of examples of how people just like you have used flash foresight to see the invisible and do the impossible.
