A futurist beyond futurists: the a, b, c, d (and e) of Ashis Nandy

Ashis Nandy is one of the most profound and penetrating futurists of our time. His thought has a deep and abiding significance. He has pioneered the notion of the future as an arena of awareness and future studies as a field of dissent. This article provides a distillation of Nandy's thought and relates his work on alternatives, colonialism and dissent to his vision of an open and pluralistic future.     

A comment on: “The solution to the forward-bias puzzle”

Pippenger (2011) recently proposed a solution to the longstanding forward-bias puzzle. He argues that the puzzling estimates obtained using the standard equation for the efficient markets hypothesis are due to omitted variable bias. He identifies the missing variables as the future change in the forward exchange rate and the future interest differential. When these are added to the standard equation, he finds a one-to-one relationship between the future change in the spot rate and the forward premium. However, we argue that his equation can only test covered interest parity and offers no insight into the forward-bias puzzle.     

Timeless leadership

The historian David McCullough, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and well-known public television host, has spent his career thinking about the qualities that make a leader great. His books, including Truman, John Adams, and 1776, illustrate his conviction that even in America's darkest moments the old-fashioned virtues of optimism, hard work, and strength of character endure. In this edited conversation with HBR senior editor Bronwyn Fryer, McCullough analyzes the strengths of American leaders past and present. Of Harry Truman he says, "He wasn't afraid to have people around him who were more accomplished than he, and that's one reason why he had the best cabinet of any president since George Washington....He knew who he was." George Washington--"a natural born leader and a man of absolute integrity"--was unusually skilled at spotting talent. Washington Roebling, who built the Brooklyn Bridge, led by example: He never asked his people to do anything he wouldn't do himself, no matter how dangerous. Franklin Roosevelt had the power of persuasion in abundance. If McCullough were teaching a business school leadership course, he says, he would emphasize the importance of listening--of asking good questions but also noticing what people don't say; he would warn against "the insidious disease of greed"; he would encourage an ambition to excel; and he would urge young MBAs to have a sense that their work maters and to make their good conduct a standard for others.     

Through the organizational looking glass: you can't plan tomorrow's organizations with today's assumptions

It's hard to imagine what our industrial society would be like if, for instance, there were no factories. How would things get produced, how would business survive? But are we, in fact, an industrial society? Are factories going to be the prime production place for a society that is conserving energy and doesn't need to travel to work because the silicon chip makes it more efficient to work at home? Who knows what the impact of energy conservation and women in the work force will be on future organizations? One thing we can be sure of, this author writes, is that whatever tomorrow brings, today's assumptions probably cannot account for it. We are, he asserts, entering a period of discontinuous change where the assumptions we have been working with as a society and in organizations are no longer necessarily true. He discusses three assumptions he sees fading--what causes efficiency, what work is, and what value organizational hierarchy has--and then gives some clues as to what our new assumptions might be. Regardless of what our assumptions actually are, however, our organizations and society will require leaders willing to take enormous risks and try unproved ways to cope with them.     

Re-thinking the future of work: Beyond binary hierarchies

How will work be organised in the future? This paper reveals that although there are multiple stories about the future of work, a similar storyline is adopted across many of the competing visions. Most visions firstly squeeze all forms of work into one side or the other or some dichotomy and then proceed to temporally and/or normatively sequence the two sides of the dualism and finally label the resultant one-dimensional and linear trajectory as some -ism, -ation or post-something-or-other. This paper evaluates critically such hierarchical binary narratives (e.g., the shift from informal to formal work, non-commodified to commodified work, localisation to globalisation, Fordism to post-Fordism, bureaucracy to post-bureaucracy) and displays how these dominant narratives, as well as the counter narratives that simply invert the temporal and/or hierarchical sequencing of these dichotomies, over-simplify lived practice. The paper concludes by offering a way forward that transcends these one-dimensional linear tales and recognises the heterogeneous and multiple directions of work in order to provide a more kaleidoscope-like understanding of the direction of work and open up the future of work to new possibilities.     

Mastering the value chain. An interview with Mark Levin of Millennium Pharmaceuticals. Interview by David Champion.

As today's business leaders are all too aware, a new scientific or technological break-through can quickly transform an industry's competitive landscape. The upheaval is often traumatic for the companies involved, forcing them to rethink their strategies and redefine their boundaries. But an industry in flux also creates vast opportunities. To seize them, companies must see how the current upheavals will affect the future distribution of profits--and then reinvent themselves to capitalize on the new sources of value. In this interview with HBR senior editor David Champion, Mark Levin, the founder and CEO of Millennium Pharmaceuticals, describes his vision of the future of the pharmaceutical industry in the wake of the genetics revolution and new technologies that have altered the economics of drug development. No company, he argues, will create serious long-term value by staying in just one or two stages of the value of chain. That's why Millennium, which started out doing basis research into genes and proteins and selling its findings to pharmaceutical giants, has moved downstream - toward the patients who actually use and pay for the drugs. He explains why the research end has become less lucrative than the more mechanical tasks of identifying, testing, and manufacturing molecules. Levin talks about the changes Millennium has undergone since its inception in 1993-from 30 workers to more than 1,000, and from one end of the value chain to the other. He discusses the company's cultural transformations as well as the partnerships and acquisitions that have helped millennium become involved in every stage of the chain-from gene to patient. Levin's vigorous approach to balancing long-term strategy with short-term tactics offers important lessons to any executive facing an industry upheaval.     

Resocialing work? Anticipatory anthropology of the labor process

My research focuses on the possible future transformations of work in the increasingly dominant computer-technology-based work environment. I surmise that one characteristic that future work might take the form of is a renewed and expanded “sociality”, in which co-operation, self-management, and qualitative social interaction are fostered to counter the potentially isolating computer-mediated environment. Since the advantage of such new technologies is also their opposite capacity to expand communication, one must encourage more communication to make use of these capabilities. Although I am somewhat skeptical about the current climate of cyberenthusiasm, I recognize that, as ethnographers, we need to take these speculations seriously and, where possible, participate actively in the creation of the kinds of futures which we prefer. I have taken a participant–observation approach to the study of “proto-cyberspace” venues which are widely seen as suggestive of the social relations of a future new social formation. I begin this essay by analyzing the argument for the resocialing hypothesis, then consider the opposite arguments which see a degradation of social relations in the work environment. Data have been derived primarily from my studies of automated information technology-mediated labor processes in the USA, the UK, and the Nordic countries.     

全球经济正进入新的不确定阶段

在2010中关村论坛上，国际货币基金组织总裁特别顾问朱民应邀做主旨演讲。他在演讲中谈到全球经济正在进入一个新的不确定阶段，而这一新变化的表现是全球的经济增长开始放慢，     

Are unions an anachronism?

The labor movement in the United States has its roots deep in the soil of worker discontent over grueling working conditions, low pay, and indifference of bosses, who profited from others' sweaty labor. As more and more grubby jobs are replaced by technological innovations, as work becomes more abstract and everyone wears a white shirt, and as managers schooled in motivation theory and humane ideals of participation replace the owner-bosses of yesterday, what role will the unions have left to play? The author of this article, who has been in both the labor force and management, explores what the changes in the labor market will be in the future and what these changes will mean for labor-management relations. He does not conclude that there is no role for unions-only that it will be very different and that to survive unions will have to tackle new issues in the workplace. That adaptation will affect management's stance as well.     

Disclosing a Random Walk

We examine a dynamic disclosure model in which the value of a firm follows a random walk. Every period, with some probability, the manager learns the firm's value and decides whether to disclose it. The manager maximizes the market perception of the firm's value, which is based on disclosed information. In equilibrium, the manager follows a threshold strategy with thresholds below current prices. He sometimes reveals pessimistic information that reduces the market perception of the firm's value. He does so to reduce future market uncertainty, which is valuable even under risk-neutrality.     

The information in the term structure

This paper presents a regression approach to measuring the information in forward interest rates about time varying premiums and future spot interest rates. Like earlier work, the regressions identify variation in the expected premiums on longer-maturity Treasury bills. The more novel evidence concerns the forecasts of future spot rates in forward rates. The regressions provide evidence that the one-month forward rate has power to predict the spot rate one month ahead. During periods preceding 1974, forward rates have reliable forecast power for one-month spot rates up to five months in the future.     

Action oriented futures studies in Hungary

The significant social changes and unstable social-economic processes we are undergoing require more participation and more future oriented grassroots activity both in designing the possible future alternatives and in the actions for the realization of them. Action oriented futures studies and participatory futures studies are in close connection, because orientation towards actions and participation of non-professionals can be strengthened by their mutual interdependence in futures work. This study gives—as examples—summaries of four Hungarian case studies using participatory futures methods: one case from the field of vocational training, two cases concerning regional development, and one about national social-economic development. Our experience shows that such selected groups have evaluated the present issues in their environments as well as the closer and broader regional issues in authentic ways. The future alternatives that were outlined regarding the future of vocational training, acceptable future alternatives of domestic social-economic development, and future living conditions of a smaller settlement and in a larger town, reflected obligation, responsibility and personal interest. That non-professionals lack sufficient future orientation, and do not see possibilities to take serious actions for the future is a read problem. Fortunately, it seems that the future and action oriented attitude of the individuals might be further developed by the use of partnership education.     

A dream of ease: Situating the future of work and leisure

This paper represents something of a history of the future. It seeks to examine, in the context of the USA and Britain, debates over the future of work that have taken place during the 20th century, and have continued into the 21st. Such debates, often classics of the futurological genre, might be caricatured as fantastic predictions of a leisured utopia, but are often in fact both more sober, and more nuanced, than such a depiction would suggest. The present paper will explore the common themes that structure future of work debates, and discourses of the future of work will be placed in social and historical context. Most importantly, the paper will uncover commonalities in understandings of what it means to be creative and free in modern society, understandings that are central to the future of work, and indeed the future in general. The paper will, in conclusion, addresses the possible reasons for a decline in predictions of a leisured future, and a growing awareness amongst commentators that work is very much here to stay.     

交通银行信息化建设成果与展望

科技是第一生产力,无论是国家的发展、经济的繁荣,都离不开科学技术的强大推动力。特别是“十一五”期间,随着经济全球化的发展和中国金融业加入WTO过渡期的结束,银行业的竞争更加激烈,客户对银行的服务也提出了更高的要求。我国银行业要全面深化经营管理体制改革,加速向现代商业银行转型,必须要依靠科技发展的强大推动力,这也注定“十一五”期间必定是我国金融信息化建设里程碑式的重要阶段。     

The great war that never was — 1871–1914

I.F. Clarke concludes his two-part study of the forecasts of future warfare in the half-century before the outbreak of World War I. He argues that the experts failed to foresee trench warfare and the long stalemate on the Western Front, precisely because they were experts, and that the devastating effects of the new military technologies ended the old-style belief in the uninterrupted forward march of mankind.     

Past Abuses and Future Uses of Private Finance and Public Private Partnerships in Transport

The article explains the origins of the Private Finance Initiative (PFI) and the way the policy has evolved under the present Labour administration into Public Private Partnership (PPP). The author gives an assessment of the future prospects for the PFI/PPP in the transport sector. He believes that PPPs can make a considerable contribution towards efficient transport service delivery and this will be maximized if there is a better understanding of what the policies are seeking to achieve. Much of the action in the immediate future in transport PPPs will be with the local authorities, including the new Greater London Authority.     

Maintaining the roots of economic development in an era of globalized production

The globalization of economic activity is being driven by market processes. The market based indicators used to measure its progress mask serious and wide-spread economic problems that also undermine our economic future. Alternative indicators, designed to give a more accurate reading of our economic well being, are being developed, but more work and wider acceptance of the concepts are needed. An examination of economic theory reveals that there is no basis for the claims that market based guideposts and decision making lead to inherently superior results and provide support for the search for non-market criteria in the evaluation of economic development. The labor movement has long sought to establish international standards as one criterion of production. A review of the global approach of the ILO, the narrowly focused European Union agreements, and the treaty-based fair deal movement provides guidance for future directions for policy work.     

Global modeling

The author relates the origins of the Limits model and the subsequent Club of Rome global models. He considers the models to be a major scientific advance much needed in the context of post-war growth mania. He gives Forrester's work within System Dynamics its rightful place in this breakthrough, and concludes by noting the deep commitment of participants in global modeling, likening it to a metaphysical experience.     

The case of tropical forests

The insensitivity of market mechanisms towards very long-term issues, external effects, and public rather than private costs, represents a threat to stocks of nonrenewable resources. In this discussion of the potential of two practical responses to the problem, the author examines the case of one such threatened resource, the world's tropical forests. As a means of limiting the effects of market discount rates upon such important assets, he puts forward the idea of a conservation rate of discount; as an alternative means of husbanding them, he proposes a tax on nonrenewable resources. He argues that, despite the obvious difficulties involved in this form of community action, the danger of depletion demands a broader response than the present fragmentary efforts. The costs of protecting the tropical forests and other such resources need not be exceptional in comparison with the benefits to present society and future generations.