Eight Ways to Bring Out Your Inner Futurist

Knowing everything about existing IT trends is great, but it's the ability to spot and act on future trends that will make you indispensable. The book Think Like a Futurist: Know What Changes, What Doesn't, and What's Next (Jossey-Bass/Available now), reveals how you can improve your forecasting skills. Author Cecily Sommers elaborates on a number of adoptable strategies to better spot market shifts and uncover the resulting opportunities. To do so, she writes, you must both grasp dramatic disruptions on the horizon and understand how to integrate those discoveries into a high-pressure corporate environment. From the book, the following eight best practices can serve as building blocks toward a more agile, forward-spinning career. Sommers is founder and president of The Push Institute, a think tank that tracks global trends and their implications for business, government and nonprofits.