Shaping Things To Come: Strategies for creating alternative enterprises

With customers demanding greater responsiveness to their particular requirements and bespoke products and services, the emphasis within many companies is shifting from retrenchment and restructuring to innovation, corporate venturing and the generation of new income streams.

Employees in the front line are expected to think and act like entrepreneurs at a time when many of them are seeking more control over their lives and greater personal fulfilment as well as economic success.

Colin shows us that there are alternatives to bland consensus and lowest common denominators and urges us to escape from prisons and traps of our own making.

Shaping Things to Come provides checklists for distinguishing fundamentals from fads, substance from surface and reality from illusion. It contains exercises for crafting new offerings and tools for striking a different balance between action and reaction, complexity and simplicity, activity and reflection, and change and continuity.

Checklists are also provided for challenging contemporary assumptions, along with exercises for formulating new marketplace offerings aimed at the unfulfilled and those who aspire to be distinctive.

Shaping Things to Come is for innovators, explorers and pioneers who dare to be different.

Prof. Colin Coulson-Thomas is an experienced company chairman and adviser to entrepreneurs and corporate boards and a seasoned business writer of guru status.