Welcome to the May issue of The Exponential Executive.

In this Issue

	Reverse Your Thinking
	Develop a Future Bias
	Our Accelerating Future
	Uldrich on CNBC and in BusinessWeek

In Other News

Almost regardless of your profession, I have likely written something in the past month that touches on your area of interest.

You can access my thoughts on the future of the following industries just by clicking on the associated link: health care, manufacturing, computing, construction, agriculture, food, travel and politics.

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Reverse Your Thinking

Too often many of us get stuck in old ways of thinking and it is difficult to break out of our established habits. Sometimes, however, a change can be as simple as reversing our thoughts. If you can spare two minutes, I'd strongly encourage you to watch this brilliant YouTube clip. I promise it will leave you feeling more optimistic about the future.

Develop a Future Bias

In my new book, Jump the Curve, I make the case that one of the best ways to innovate into the future is to “develop a future bias.”

A future bias is the opposite of “hindsight bias,” and hindsight bias is, quite simply, the idea that after an event occurs most people take credit for "knowing" it would happen. For instance, by 1920, most citizens claimed that they knew that mankind would “always” fly.

Unfortunately, this isn’t true. Most people were completely blind-sided by human flight. Lord Kelvin, the world’s most renowned scientist claimed in 1899 that “Heavier than air machines are impossible,” and no less an authority than the New York Times wrote in an editorial in December 1903—just two weeks before the Wright Brother’s historic first flight—that human flight would not be achievable for “the next 1 to 10 million years.”

If want to learn how to develop a future bias and avoid being caught unaware by the next "impossible" idea, read on.

Our Accelerating Future

As a futurist and business forecaster, I often need to temper client's enthusiam regarding new emerging technologies. I do this by explaining that society doesn’t always adopt new technologies as fast as early advocates expect. This occurs for a variety of reasons -- as I explained in this recent article.

As with almost every issue, however, there is another side to the story; and I’d now like to make the case for why many emerging technologies will be adopted at an ever accelerating rate.

Ray Kurzweil addressed this issue in his outstanding book, The Singularity is Near, when he noted that the rate of “paradigm shift” is doubling every decade. As a historical analogy, he noted that it took 35 years before 25% of the population adopted the telephone. The radio took 31 years; the television 26 years; the personal computer 16 years; the mobile phone 12 years; and the World Wide Web only 10 years.

To understand why "the next big thing" will transform society in even a shorter period of time -- and to learn what some of these "big things" might be -- click here.

Uldrich on CNBC and in BusinessWeek

As regular readers know, in addition to authoring Jump the Curve, I also had another book, Green Investing: A Guide to Making Money through Environment-Friendly Stocks, published this spring.

In the past few weeks, BusinessWeek has run an extensive interview with me entitled ”Clever Plays in Cleantech” and in late April I appeared CNBC’s “Closing Bell.” The entire video can be viewed here.