Creating Futures: Scenario Planning as a Strategic Management Tool

Rating:
Summary: There is Nothing here!
Review: According to this book:
In the 70's the french invented everything, and the rest is history.

This "work" purports to be an "analytic approach" to the problem of scenario building. Instead it is a mish mosh of chapters and unordered subsections which have no obvious relation to each other. Moreover, if the book had containd any real (useful) information, it is lost between the lack of: ability to write, the editor's sacred reponsilibty to do his job, and the translation which I found bordering on criminal.

Still you can get out enough to know that there is no content to this book whatsoever. Warning, this task entails much mental and physical anguish!

STILL if you are dying to know what this book is trying but failing to say, look up the paper by "Ioannis A. Sideris" entitled: "THE USE OF SCENARIO PLANNING METHODOLOGY IN MOBILE BUSINESS AS A LEARNING TOOL". I do not want to give more info...just Try Google.

Finally, if you want a true sample of an analytic approach, look at various people's work at Rand, particualrly on the global warming problem. Particualrly works by R.Lempert.

Rating:
Summary: Rich in techniques, hard to pick out the ideas
Review: I was inspired by this book to focus on the future more in general, and in particular to deliberately imagine the future as a spectrum of possible scenarios, which I could watch emerge and either became more likely or fall away as possibilities.

The book was very dense reading, really an MBA text, and had some good case studies and methodology description.

Lot's of comment about the author's reputation and consulting gigs.

I was surprised to learn that the French had made so many very, highly, significant, and important contributions to strategic thinking.

Rating:
Summary: Heavy--for professionals and academicians only
Review: Professor Michel Godet is a Frenchman with 14 books and over 200 papers under his belt. A specialist in strategic planning, he emphasizes the careful use of tools such as scenario planning.

The book is a valuable contribution to the literature of serious-really serious-strategic planners. It will be most appreciated by those who have a very strong scientific bent and are comfortable working with models. Godet's approach is considerably more rigorous than futures-thinking approaches applied in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. The concept of the book is very long-range, evidenced by quotes like "the faster the car, the stronger the headlights must be" and "the longer a tree takes to grow, the earlier you have to plant it." English-speaking futurists tend to look more short-range and medium-range with more of an application of intuition mixed with scientific research.

Americans have become accustomed to engaging in quite a bit of internet research to gather information needed for evaluation, decision-making, and planning. Godet describes the internet as "a computerized dumpster," all the while acknowledging that one may still find gold in a dump.

This book is complex and slow reading. The content is "heavy." Nine chapters are followed by a bibliography and index. The first five chapters are titled How to Think About the Future Now, Why Do the Experts Get it Wrong, Hunting Down Cliches, How to be Rigorous with Scenario Planning, and Initiating the Entire Process. The balance of the book, save the last chapter on The Human Factor, consists of case studies.

Good marks for content. Marks off for not making the learning a bit easier to move through. If you're not a real pro-or aspiring pro-in strategic planning, save your time and money.