The Background Buzz Insider
July 22, 2015

Trust to Your Intuition? Not for This World

"Realize that much of what we thought we knew about how the world works is wrong."

Despite the realization that we live in a fast-changing world, most of us tend to expect the future to look much like the past. And in the 25 years leading up to the 2008 meltdown (a period economists James Stock and Mark Watson called the Great Moderation), there was some reason for that. Economic news was generally good -- asset values moved up, natural resources became more abundant, jobs were plentiful and children were raised with the assumption of rising prosperity.

But in No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Global Forces Breaking All the Trends (Public Affairs, May 2015), authors Richard Dobbs, James Manyika and Jonathan Woetzel of the McKinsey Global Institute warn that the global economy is going through a transition that is happening 10 times faster than Britain's Industrial Revolution and at 300 times the scale. Leaders whose formative years came in the last 25 years need to "reset their intuition" based on what is ahead, not what they've experienced in the past.

What are these four disruptive forces?

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