When we think of big, abrupt global changes, COVID-19 is top of mind as a modern trigger point that forced the world to re-evaluate how we live, work, and engage. Frankly, many around the world responded better than expected to those challenges. It forced us to see the face of our own relevance with our world rapidly changing around us.

What if I were to say that the abundance of learning through COVID, both successes and adjustment bruises, will be an important practice run to help us build our capacity to face and adapt to an even faster and vastly different future? Hard to imagine? Well, my friends, we are now standing at the intersection of what was and what will be. What we will need to leave behind and embrace if we are to adapt, grow and remain relevant in a world of accelerating change. The question is, will you be ready?

What’s Marialane Reading

The Future is Faster Than You Think: How converging Technologies are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives
By Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler

The Future is Faster Than You Think should be on everyone’s reading list for 2022, and especially for those in business and public service organizations.

This book serves as a platform of knowledge to help us:

• Envision what will be disrupted (think big leaps like from “horses to automobiles”)
• Anticipate and acclimate to the realities and impacts of rapid change
• Understand what will replace what we know today, in a decade, and beyond.

Why should you read this book?

I often say to my clients and audience participants during speaking engagements, “Are you learning as fast as the world is changing?”

There has never been a time that this question is so poignant and pressing. Innovators, futurists and best-selling authors, Diamandis and Kotler, lay out the convergence of technologies that are accelerating at a rate never seen or experienced in the history of humankind. And in the next decade these technologies will overtake our current understanding of the world, how it will work in the future, and how we must adapt along the way. To quote the book – “…formerly independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology are beginning to converge with other independent waves of exponentially accelerating technology…in other words, these waves are starting to overlap, stacking atop one another, producing tsunami-sized behemoths that threaten to wash away most everything in their path.”

New ways of being, doing, and living will replace what is washed away.

Key Insights for Leaders

The insight you will gain from reading this book will likely help you plan for the capabilities and talent needed for the future. It will also shed light on how to prepare your people for this transition. It will influence many of your decisions as you think about new opportunities that these technologies offer.

About the Book Authors

Diamandis, a space-entrepreneur-turned-innovation-pioneer, and Kotler, bestselling author and peak performance expert, probe the science of technological convergence and how it will reinvent every part of our lives—transportation, retail, advertising, education, health, entertainment, food, and finance—taking humanity into uncharted territories and reimagining the world as we know it.