Leaders Make the Future

“Bob Johansen’s thesis that we, as business leaders, can create and guide our own future in a competitive and ever-changing marketplace has permeated throughout our organization at Scripps Networks Interactive. In Leaders Make the Future he takes his thesis to the next level, providing readers with a wise and thought-provoking guide to success in a changing world. It’s going to be a must-read at our company.” —Kenneth W. Lowe, Chairman, President, and CEO, Scripps Networks Interactive, Inc. “The first edition of Leaders Make the Future opened new vistas for visionary leaders and provided a road map for them. The second edition creates urgency to develop skill sets necessary to lead by describing the time compression of change and the resulting dynamic interdependencies of the complexity of the changes. These complexities not only require flexible and agile responses but also describe a world in which new measurements are required. These measurements can best be determined using a combination of learning from the social sciences combined with analytical applications or in a sense a set of social differential equations.” —Alfred A. Plamann, CEO, Unified Grocers, Inc. “Bob Johansen focuses on how leaders can make decisions and perform when the pace of decision making and its consequences in our interdependent world have never been greater. Leaders Make the Future provides an analytical and operational framework for decision making in the VUCA soup.”  —Thomas H. Glocer, former CEO, Thomson Reuters “At EA University, we rock with the excitement and dangers of volatile and uncertain futures for our industry. Heck, for our whole world! We use Bob Johansen’s concepts and future capabilities in preparing our high-potential leaders for this future. If there is uncertainty in your future, you will want your leaders reading this book.” —Andy Billings, Vice President, Profitable Creativity, EA University, Electronic Arts “Leaders Make the Future is required reading for my students and essential reading for all interested in a better world and social profit. It is concise, readable, understandable, useful, necessary, replete with examples relevant to now and to tomorrow’s world, and applicable to both career and daily life.” —Linda Golden, Marlene and Morton Meyerson Centennial Professor in Business, McCombs School of Business, University of Texas at Austin “Leaders Make the Future applies the maker mind-set to leadership. The best leaders in the future will also be makers.” —Dale Dougherty, founder, MAKE magazine and Maker Faire “Bob Johansen offers clear and inspiring guideposts to deal with profound leadership challenges that face us in the 21st century. Leaders take note: you will need both strategy and learning, expressed with great clarity. This book is an important call to action." —Willie Pietersen, Professor of the Practice of Management, Columbia Business School “Kudos to Bob Johansen for this revised edition of Leaders Make the Future! Not only can the leadership skills Bob outlines be applied toward producing effective leaders, but they are excellent for promoting happier, healthier ones too!” —Kelly Traver, MD, CEO and founder, Healthiest You “Having lived and worked with the future for almost forty years, the Institute for the Future’s Bob Johansen returns to the present and shares his key insights on how leaders can move their organizations forward. If you want to thrive in the future—or even create your own—then reading this book will be time well spent.” —Tom Kelley, General Manager, IDEO, and author of The Ten Faces of Innovation  “We find the unique perspective that Bob illustrates in this book incredibly important as we prepare our top leaders for the future.” —David Small, Vice President, Global Talent Management and Leadership Institute, McDonald’s Corporation “Bob Johansen has made Leaders Make the Future even better since anticipating the economic meltdown in 2008 and closely tracking events since then. By asking what skills leaders will need, working backward from future-shaping forces he and the Institute for the Future have identified, he offers a fresh and important call to action. The book is full of practical advice from watching Silicon Valley’s booms, busts, and recoveries for more than three decades.” —David Sibbet, President, Grove Consultants International, and author of Visual Meetings and Visual Teams “Johansen offers steps to strengthen our skills as well as insights to inspire us to build a better future. It is the must-read partner to his other recent book, Get There Early.”  —Jean McClung Halloran, Senior Vice President, Human Resources, Agilent Technologies