Joshua Cooper Ramo is Vice Chairman and Co-CEO of Kissinger Associates and a member of the board of directors at Starbucks and FedEx. He’s also a keynote speaker at PCBC 2016 in San Francisco. Ramo’s new book, The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune, and Survival in the Age of Networks, proposes an “age of networks”—the emergence of constant, widespread connection. Recently, he spoke with Professional Builder about keeping pace in a volatile financial climate, staying ahead of your clients, and what neurosurgery and laying a concrete floor have in common.
Professional Builder: What is the “seventh sense”?
Joshua Cooper Ramo: We live in an age where almost everything changes because of connectivity. I expect that people who build and design houses think about that and understand that almost every aspect of design—what they spec, how they design, what you want in your house—has changed because we live in a world where we’re connected to all kinds of things. That revolution has been happening on a practical, physical level for 5 or 10 years now. It’s affecting everything from currencies to how we fight wars to how we conduct our politics. Like every big revolution, it shows up everywhere—in the headlines, in our daily lives. The seventh sense is the idea that some people have an instinct for how this works that’s better, sharper than the rest of us. The book is designed to teach people how to think about connected systems so that they can have the same kind of edge. The people who see what’s coming in financial markets or in politics have that edge. It’s important that the rest of us develop it, too.
For the full interview, follow the link below.
