The Signals Are Talking ─ Why Today's Fringe Is Tomorrow's Mainstream

?How did we miss that?” is perhaps the scariest question for a business leader to face: it's the one that they have to ask themselves when one day they wake up to discover that a competitor or startup has just released something new that changes their world forever. If you're asking this question, it's probably too late: you didn’t see this important new development coming, or didn’t understand it well enough to take it seriously, and now you must play the most dreaded game of all?catch-up.

In The Signals are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe is Tomorrow’s Mainstream, Amy Webb shows you how to avoid having to ask that frightening question. Successful business leaders seem to have a sixth sense about what's next; an uncanny ability to predict the next big trend or market development. But it's not magic. Webb teaches you how to spot today the signs of tomorrow's trends; specifically, the trends affecting your world?your market, your products, and your competitors. She demonstrates how the future doesn’t arrive fully formed, but rather emerges step-by-step, appearing first around the fringes of society. But that future is easy to miss unless you know where and how to look.

Books about the near-future, not to mention countless blogs, postings, seminars, and conferences, simply tell you what the author thinks is coming, leaving you to pick the prognostication you prefer. Amy Webb shows you where and how to look in the present for harbingers of the future. Her book is an invaluable resource for leaders of all kinds.

Amy Webb is an author, futurist and founder of the Future Today Institute, a leading future forecasting and strategy firm that researches technology and answers "What's the future of X?" for a global client base. Her future forecasting work has been featured in the New York Times, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Fast Company and more. Her research has also been cited in several academic papers. She is a lecturer on the future of media at Columbia University, and this fall, she will join NYU's Stern School of Business as an adjunct professor to teach a new course on forecasting the future of technology. She was a 2014-15 Visiting Nieman Fellow at Harvard University. She founded Webbmedia Group (FTI's predecessor); co-founded Knowledgewebb Training, which facilitates hands-on workshops; and co-founded Spark Camp, a next-generation convener that facilitates important conversations on the future of a better society. Data is being adapted as a feature film, which is currently in production. Her previous book Data, a Love Story is being adapted as a feature film, which is currently in production.