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The Seventh Sense
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- Joshua Cooper Ramo
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 Seventh Sense does sound a little like the latest Hollywood sci-fi blockbuster, but in this book the question of 'how in the face of a burning, changing and shifting world does one train an instinct for the essence of what is going on?' is brilliantly answered. Backed up by fascinating anecdotes, Ramo helps us to understand why we need to develop a Seventh Sense just as Friedrich Nietzsche suggested at the turn of the last century, that humans needed a 'sixth sense' to survive what then seemed like the insane madness of the industrial revolution. To many of us it would seem that the world is going off its rails. To fear is to give way to even more fear. It would be far better to understand the 'unseen' forces at work and develop a 'sight', a sense and instinct for what may come next. The training of an instinct, of a truly fresh way of looking at the world requires a rewiring of our minds. The purpose of this book is to help all of us to start the process of rewiring by helping us contemplate and reflect through the author's stories, his weaving back and forth in history and his deep insights into the nature of connections.
The Seventh Sense reveals a fundamental insight which he elaborates throughout the book that we are in the earliest stages of a shift, a change in power. We are in the age of network power - power which is at once concentrated and diffused. Networks emerge when nodes which can be composed of people, financial markets, computers, mobile devices, drones or anything lively and connectable, link to other nodes. Networks can be defined by geography, language, currency, or data protocols in myriad ways. All networks are defined by connections and where does the power come from? It comes from the number, type and speed of relationships they establish and use. These ever expanding, ever thicker webs can be mapped and together reflect what we recognize as network power. Those of us with the Seventh Sense can see these patterns and linkages and understand how these connections are changing the fabric of the world we live in. Connection also changes the nature of the object inexorably and gives it more power. For instance, a computer without the Internet or an analog phone are incomplete and woefully inadequate for our needs. Ironically, the more liberated we are - easy jet travel, smart phones, etc. - the more enmeshed we become. The Seventh Sense involves a mastery of connection; in short the Seventh Sense is the ability to look at any object and see the way in which it is changed by connection. It is Napoleon's coup d'oeil - the essential skill of the age. The nature of connection is also changing - it is becoming instant - for example you can imagine what instant AI enabled networks are capable of. Networks will be used in ways their designers never dreamed of - Twitter turned to terror recruitment, Bitcoin as an alternative to Central Banks, etc.
Vice Chairman and Co-Chief Executive of consulting firm Kissinger Associates, Ramo shares his world view of how the standing of today's super power, the US, will be profoundly affected in the networked age and how many of the assumptions of that leaders in the US, notably Trump, are so much at odds with the changing landscape. He shares six paradoxes which may lead to a potential buckling of the US and since the whole world is connected to the US, this may affect all of us in different ways. 'A major state can lose many battles, but the only loss that is always fatal is to be defeated in strategy' - he quotes General Liu Yazhou and he shares his lament of the lack of direction and strategy displayed by the US. He explains how the diffused nature of power in networks will make so many struggles and uprisings in the Middle East and the protests emanating after the recent US elections, so difficult to manage for today's leaders and politicians. Power lies in the network and not so much in the institutions that they represent. He explains how social structures world over will get impacted.
The networks of power creates a new elite, a new class or caste that builds the gates and decides who will be in or out, who will benefit from being in the network and who will stay out of it. This caste has a new perspective and they work in stealth. Strategic thinking in the future will require a mastery of gate keeping and an understanding of how to shape the terrain based on this mastery. Google, Amazon and Facebook are concentrating power, building gates and shaping the terrain even as we sleep.
Ramo also throws more light on why our world is becoming increasingly VUCA (volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous). Connections mean systems take on new forms as they adapt, becoming more complex like human immunology - remember the Ebola? Recognizing this inherent complexity, recognizing that it is wrong to look at the world and consider it filled merely with random events and recognizing the patterns created by connections and networks which can be searched, mapped and studied is to have Seventh Sense. Financial crisis, battling terrorists, managing the risks of bio-development will get more difficult unless we understand and master new tools like AI, quantum computing and big data to deal with this.
Finally, Ramo poses a remarkable question as fundamental as the answer and is mind boggling in its implication. Why are the networks really for anyway? The short answer - they exist, to compress time because speed kills old habits and ideas in a way nothing else does. Absolute speed is absolute power, witness high speed trading, high bandwidths, the dominance of Application Programming Interfaces in software leading to faster and leaner programming. Wars for most of human history have been for the control of space and territory, now they will be for the control of time. Geography will be replaced by topology. Moscow and St. Petersburg are 400 miles apart. In topological terms, the connection is 0.3 milliseconds on light speed fibre optics.
Power is moving now from institutions and ideas built for liberty to ones build for enclosure, connection, for speed and beyond human intelligence that complexity demands. Our best for the future is to cultivate a new temperament which Ramo calls the Seventh Sense which helps us come to manage the terms of our enmeshment.
To read the complete issue click here.
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