Ten Steps Ahead

Business visionaries like Steve Jobs and Richard Branson are the stuff of legend. Yet we fumble in describing what they actually do. TEN STEPS AHEAD explains how it's not that some people can magically see opportunities - it's that the rest of us are blind to the ones all around us. We learn, for instance: How Richard Branson had the foresight to trademark Virgin Galactic in the early 1990s, when private spaceflight was science fiction; How Richard Feynman made breakthroughs in quantum mechanics be pretending he was an electron; Why Jeff Hawkins walked around with a block of wood and a chopstick to design the first Palm Pilot. Erik Calonius, who has interviewed many of the greatest living visionaries across disciplines and industries, weaves together their stories, highlights their shared attributes, and draws on science to help us understand what sets them apart and how we too can see (and make) the future.