Word: schwartze
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...HEADY STUFF WHEN CAPTAINS OF industry and world leaders--even movie directors--buy into your visions of the future. But for Peter Schwartz, it's all in a day's work. Remember the talking ads, animated cereal box and self-updating newspaper in Stephen Spielberg's Minority Report, set in 2054? All from Schwartz. Meanwhile, his consulting firm, Global Business Network (GBN), based in Emeryville, Calif., plots out future scenarios--such as whether another SARS outbreak could affect Singapore Airlines--to help businesses plan for the unthinkable. "Somewhere in each scenario exercise--if we've done our homework...
That was particularly true before 9/11. The year before, as part of a study for a Senate commission, Schwartz had brought up the horrifying possibility of terrorists flying planes into the World Trade Center. That wasn't the first of his scenarios to come true. In the 1970s, he and his mentors at Shell warned of the rise of OPEC and the oil crisis, and as the cold war raged in the 1980s, he foresaw the downfall of the Soviet Union and the rise of an obscure apparatchik named Mikhail Gorbachev...
...Schwartz flinches when you call any of them predictions, since each scenario is only one of a set. The Greening of Russia scenario that foresaw the rise of Gorbachev, for example, was balanced against the New Stalinism, which imagined a hard-line Soviet backlash. "If you try to predict something," says Schwartz, "you end up with very conventional ideas. Scenarios help you anticipate surprises...
...Rebecca D. O’Brien contributed to the reporting of this story. —Staff writer Bari M. Schwartz can be reached at bschwart@fas.harvard.edu...
...Staff writer Bari M. Schwartz can be reached at bschwart@fas.harvard.edu...