Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #77785 in Books
• Published on: 1996-04-15
• Released on: 1996-04-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

From AudioFile
Author and president of an international consulting firm, Peter Schwartz presents lessons in thinking for the future. Schwartz offers scenarios from the oil industry that can be applied to all aspects of life. His first-hand accounts, originally developed for Royal Dutch/Shell, are invaluable tools for creative thinking in one's personal life and in business. Schwartz's methods will enable anyone to think more creatively. These tapes offer lessons not found elsewhere. E.L.C. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Ingram
Presenting a revolutionary approach to developing strategic vision in business and in life, a guide for managers, entrepreneurs, and investors explains how to apply creative and intuitive skills to corporate practices. Reprint.

Customer Reviews

What a great book?
You have to buy The Art of the Long View. I don't know how to explain how great the book is. Don't hesitate to grap one

Open Your Brain and Reperceive the World
This book will help you to learn the scenario planning process. At the beginning, the author presents a short but insightful example how scenario playing an important role for starting up a gardening tool company. The author also shares an "information hunting and gathering process" which tell you where to get some helpful data. Various factors influencing the futures are also discussed (including socials, politics, economic, technologies, and environment). In addition, at the end of the book, the author provides a user's guide (eight steps of how to hold a strategic conversation) and eight steps to develop scenarios which I found very useful. The book enables us to use scenario planning as a tool to deal with uncertain futures. Scenarios help us to awake and "reperceive" others possible and impossible alternative futures including both short and long term. The author also believes that a good scenario leads you to ask better questions. The point of scenario-planning is "to help us suspend our disbelieve in all the futures: to allow us to think that any on of them might place. Then, we can prepare for what we DO NOT think is going to happen." (p.195)

However, one annoying thing in this book is that the author keeps referring to chapters (e.g. look in chapter 7) but physically, there are just no chapters number indicated in the book. There are just short titles in the table of content and at the beginning of each chapter. You have to go back and forth between the TOC and chapters to to see which one is actually being referred. However, I consider this is a minor issue comparing to what you will learn from this book.

You may find this book useful if you are preparing for your strategic plans, making decisions having critical impacts to your firm or your personal life, or even you are just an ordinary reader, this book will open your mind to a new level of critical thinking and imagination about unfolding futures. Highly recommend.

Scenario for personal life
As an international student who stays in Hawaii for a while, Peter Schwartz's The Art of the Long View inspired me to make planning for my future whether in Hawaii or other places. His explanations about scenario building may be adapted to my personal life as well as in business to plan my better life in future. Moreover, as a human being, we have an innate ability to build scenarios and to forecast the future. He said that scenarios are apparatuses for helping us to acquire a long view in a great uncertainty rather than simply predicting the future. Therefore, it is possible to prepare for our future.

In real time, the eight steps of developing scenarios which he suggested in his book are used in many fields. Most websites about forecasting adopt his idea as a basic foundation to prepare alternative future with social, economic, political, and technological points of views. Although he said scenario building as "art" not "science", it may not reduce the important of scenario building to identify alternative dimensions of future by recognizing the driving forces and composing the plots.

I recommend for a beginner in particularly non-native English speaker in forecasting or in future planning reading this book as a guide. His guide is easy and simple to apply for everyone to anticipate unexpected changes.