Alvin Toffler

Credited by Ted Turner as inspiring his creation of CNN, Alvin Toffler is as much a historian as a futurologist and makes no apology for extrapolating the past to predict the future. The central feature of his futurology is to note patterns in human history.

His first wave of history begins some 10,000 years ago when man planted the first seeds and created agriculture, the foundation stone of early civilizations. The second wave is the Industrial Revolution that started in England in the 18th century and culminated in the clash of industrialized nations in World War II.

Now we are in the third wave, the Information or Knowledge Age. This era is characterized by information technology and the mass culture of the United States.

'Centralized management made the world go round from the rise of the nation-state through to World War II,' says Toffler. 'In a simple system, a single individual could provide the wisdom and authority to guide a large enterprise.
'No one believes that anymore. The emphasis, since the 1970s at least, has been on decentralization, on delegation of authority and empowerment, on self-managing teams, on the leader-as-facilitator as opposed to the leader-as-god.

'Running a large enterprise from a hub on the basis of a single person's competence is like a doctor making morning rounds and prescribing Valium for everybody. You can't doctor an entire economy, or even an entire organization, with one medicine anymore.

'Diversity and change is the key. Each leader should check for the novelty ratio on an organization's offerings: how many are six months old or less versus five years old or more?'
Thus Toffler's idea of leadership is one of the ability to handle change, and improve existing practices.

As he argues: 'In every company new ideas, new products, and new people are waiting to be born. The leader's task is to get them out and breathing.

'In the third wave, good ideas can come from anywhere and anyone. It may mean courage, imagination, entrepreneurialism, warmth, organizational savvy or street smarts. These are the kinds of brains that will thrive in the third wave.'

Toffler recalls that when he was consulting with the US Department of Defense he had doubts about this organization's capacity to change, but took heart when he learned that the new motto among many in the US military is 'Disagreement will not be treated as disloyalty'.

He thinks the leaders of tomorrow must be 'managers of adaptation equipped with a whole set of new, nonlinear skills.' And this guru of the future suggests: 'The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.'

It will be fascinating to hear what new thoughts this master has to offer his audience in Dubai this autumn. The programme contains a few clues.
His themes include: How the 21st century economy is emerging from cyberspace, hyper competition and chaos theory? How agile do you need to be? How the world is breaking up: dividing economic power between the knowledge based economies for the rest of the world?

And finally: Dubai and the next economy? corporate and government leadership, this means unprecedented challenges as well as opportunities. While competition will be fiercer, both companies as well as government require constant re-invention and innovation to keep up, both in terms of products and organizational management.