This ability to see the present with fresh eyes is central to the success of the greatest entrepreneurs. Their creativity lies in their ability to understand and apply ways that the world has changed, while everyone else is still following the old map.

The App Store is so central to our experience of the smartphone today that it’s easy to forget that the first iPhone didn’t have an app store.

The future is the outcome of millions of intersecting vectors, which add up in unexpected ways. The art is to pick out important vectors and weave a net from them in which to catch a view of the future.

You must always be alert, though, for an inflection point where the old gives way to something profoundly new.

Once you’ve identified a trend, though, it’s easier to recognize early which new developments are important, because they are the next step in the continued acceleration along the vector, as entrepreneurs and inventors continue, in Wallace Stevens’s magnificent phrase, to “search a possible for its possibleness.”11 In other words, the news from the

I found that Clayton Christensen, the author of The Innovator’s Dilemma and The Innovator’s Solution, had developed a framework that explained what I was observing. In a 2004 article in Harvard Business Review, he articulated “the law of conservation of attractive profits” as follows: “When attractive profits disappear at one stage in the value

Oxford University researchers estimate that up to 47% of human tasks, including many components of white-collar jobs, may be done by machines within as little as twenty years.4

When Mark says it is time for Facebook to shift from a focus on friends and family to “the social infrastructure for community—for supporting us, for keeping us safe, for informing us, for civic engagement, and for inclusion of all,” you can see the promise of a virtuous circle of engagement.42 Where engagement seems to be the wrong fitness

“Services do not only represent a software structure but also the organizational structure. The services have a strong ownership model, which combined with the small team size is intended to make it very easy to innovate. In some sense you can see these services as small startups within the walls of a bigger company. Each of these services require