Peter Schwartze Boeken

Argues a long period of prosperity will provide businesses with an historic opportunity to alleviate many of the world's problems

This collection of essays offers a critical assessment of Labour in a Single Shot, a groundbreaking documentary video workshop. From 2011 to 2014, curator Antje Ehmann and film- and video-maker Harun Farocki produced an art project of truly global proportions. They travelled to fifteen cities around the world to conduct workshops inspired by cinema history’s first film, Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory, shot in 1895 by the Lumière brothers in France. While the workshop videos are in colour and the camera was not required to remain static, Ehmann and Farocki’s students were tasked with honouring the original Lumière film’s basic parameters of theme and style. The fascinating result is a collection of more than 550 short videos that have appeared in international exhibitions and on an open-access website, offering the widest possible audience the opportunity to ponder contemporary labour in multiple contexts around the world.

Events like the collapse of a major energy company or a devastating terrorist attack seem to come from nowhere. Not only are they shocking and disturbing, it often appears that their prevention would have been impossible. Not so, argues Peter Schwartz in this fascinating book. Many 'surprises', he says, soon acquire an aura of inevitability once the underlying patterns of behaviour are examined. And although we cannot do anything about the past, we can try to do something about the future. What, then, is the next big surprise? How might it play out? INEVITABLE SURPRISES covers high-level, universal trends -- from business to international affairs, from biotechnology to climate change -- but presents them in the context of the particular and concrete choices that different people must make. It distinguishes those forces beyond our control from the future that we can influence and help design -- for the world around us, for our organisations, and for ourselves.

What increasingly affects all of us, whether professional planners or individuals preparing for a better future, is not the tangibles of life—bottom-line numbers, for instance—but the intangibles: our hopes and fears, our beliefs and dreams. Only stories—scenarios—and our ability to visualize different kinds of futures adequately capture these intangibles.In The Art of the Long View, now for the first time in paperback and with the addition of an all-new User's Guide, Peter Schwartz outlines the "scenaric" approach, giving you the tools for developing a strategic vision within your business.Schwartz describes the new techniques, originally developed within Royal/Dutch Shell, based on many of his firsthand scenario exercises with the world's leading institutions and companies, including the White House, EPA, BellSouth, PG&E, and the International Stock Exchange.