Future Foundation is a trends and forecasting agency with global reach has been operational for nearly twenty years is completely independent of any other company or organization beyond sharing general values, has no political opinions partners and counsels more than two hundred corporate clients runs its own data bank of opinion research findings, going back years probes consumer opinion in twenty-eight countries on an annual basis manages its own team of two hundred trendspotters across ...

What if working like crazy to beat the competition did exactly the opposite, making you mediocre and more like the competition?In today’s world of overabundant consumer choices and superfluous apps, upgrades, add-ons, and features, brands have become nearly identical, as their efforts to outdo one another have pushed them into a dizzying herd of indistinct options.Youngme Moon identifies the outliers, the mavericks, the iconoclasts—the players who have thou...

Betterness: Economics for Humans is a powerful call to arms for a post-capitalist economy. Umair Haque argues that just as positive psychology revolutionized our understanding of mental health by recasting the field as more than just treating mental illness, we need to rethink our economic paradigm. Why? Because business as we know it has reached a state of diminishing returns-though we work harder and harder, we never seem to get anywhere. This has led to a diminishing of the com...

Discover the secrets to successful luxury brand management with this bestselling guide written by two of the world's leading experts on luxury branding, Jean-Noël Kapferer and Vincent Bastien, providing a unique blueprint for luxury brands and companies.Having established itself as the definitive work on the essence of a luxury brand strategy, this book defines the differences between premium and luxury brands and products, analyzing the nature of true luxury brand...

"Worthless" is the single most important book young men and women can read before they attend college. While teachers, guidance counselors and even parents are afraid to tell you the truth in an effort to spare your feelings, “Worthless” delivers a blunt and real-world assessment about the economic realities and consequences of choosing various degrees with a necessary and tough fatherly love. Don’t lie to yourself. And certainly don’t waste four years of your youth and thousand...

A degree is no longer a passport to success in today’s job market.Going to university used to be a passport to future success, but that’s no longer the case. For some students, it’s still a good choice that leads to a successful career after graduation, but for many their degrees are worthless pieces of paper. Choose the wrong program and graduation is more likely to lead to disillusionment and debt than a steady paycheque.Yet parents, guidance counselors, and politicians s...

"Amidst a thousand tirades against the excesses and waste of consumer society, [this book] offers us something genuinely new and invigorating: a way out." —Steven Johnson, New York Times–bestselling author of The Infernal MachineA groundbreaking and original book, What's Mine is Yours articulates for the first time the roots of "collaborative consumption," the authors' term for the technology-based peer communities that are transforming th...

In this manifesto-style book, radical economist and strategist Umair Haque calls for the end of the corrupt business ideals that exemplify business as usual. His passionate vision for "Capitalism 2.0," or "constructive capitalism," is one in which old paradigms of wasteful growth, inefficient competition, and self-destructive ideals are left far behind at this reset moment. According the Haque, the economic crisis was not a market failure or even a financial crisis, but an institutional on...

Many candidates like to use model answers when they are preparing for the IELTS speaking and writing modules. This book provides 101 model answers for Writing Task 2, including essays on many of the most recent questions asked during 2013 and the beginning of 2014.The model answers are intended as a guide. Candidates can use the ideas presented in the essays in their own writing. In addition, candidates may find that the vocabulary and structures used in the answers help them to cr...

The oldest Baby Boomers have turned 60 so everybody's starting to talk about the "aging of the population."But most of the talk is about numbers: what percentage of the population will be how old in what year, what it will mean for welfare rates or health-care costs, etc. But what's missing is the qualitative story. It's not there are more "older people" out there. It's that they are not the same as the older people of any previous generation.This book will explore how the Baby Boomer gene...

What Chinese Want provides a sweeping look at contemporary Chinese consumer behavior, how its cultural influences separate it from the West, and how marketers and businesses can harness the natural strengths of this age-old civilization to succeed there.Today, most Americans take for granted that China will be the next global superpower. But despite the nation's growing influence, the average Chinese person is still a mystery - or, at best, a baffling set ...

Modern culture’s worship of “how-to” pragmatism has turned us into instruments of efficiency and commerce—but we’re doing more and more about things that mean less and less. We constantly ask “how? and still struggle to find purpose and act on what matters. Instead of acting on what we know to be of importance, we wait for bosses to change, we seek the latest fad, we invest in one more degree. Asking how keeps us safe—instead of being led by our hearts into uncharted territory, we keep our...