Review: The Click Moment – Seizing Opportunity in An Unpredictable World

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Information Society
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Frans Johansson

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Gift for Unemployed Smart People,August 31, 2012

I am a 60-year old unemployed smart person with no pensions, and received this book as a gift. It came to me as I am in the middle of writing what I hope will be a seminal work on the future of public governance, and to my enormous surprise, not only has the book been a “pick me up” of a read for me as the unemployed smart guy, it has also been relevant to my new book.

The author's core message is: the world is random, embrace that, seek out as much random as you can handle, be alert for “aha” moments, and act instantly to take advantage when such moments occur.

At the very end of the book the author says that one should use randomness to one's statistical advantage, which is to say, embrace the random, chase the random, respect the random, and your chances of “scoring” in some way will be better.

I am loading an image above that includes the word diversity, in part to highlight why I connected immediately to the author's story of how innovation is inspired by diversity, what some CEO's who have a hard time understanding Equal Employment Opportunity (EEO) programs can instantly get: a side door for insights that do not occur to white, well-fed, preening males.

The author discusses very ably how “old world” is about rules and norms, this is a world where 10,000 hours of practice at anything will indeed make you a world champion, because the parameters are fixed and the rules don't change. In today's world, on the other hand, where a woman's slap can trigger a revolution in Tunesia and the downfall of Libya's dictator, not only are the “expedrts” wrong most of the time, but open platforms change everything–there are no binding rules (to which I would add, governments are so screwed up and ineffective that three fifths or more of the global economy now routes around government).

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