SUMMARY
- Follows Joshua Cooper Ramo exploration through history of the rise of inter-connectivity.
- Looks to the future challenges of network topologies resembling old power brokers.
- Provides insights to the lessons Ramo believes essential for business and finance of tomorrow.
Review of The Seventh Sense: Power, Fortune and Survival in the Age of Networks by Joshua Cooper Ramo, Little, Brown & Company, 2016
I did not expect to learn much from The Seventh Sense since author Joshua Cooper Ramo is a part of the pinnacle elite as co-CEO and Vice Chairman of Kissinger Associates and thanks Bob Rubin and Jim Baker in his Acknowledgements. Yet, The Seventh Sense is also praised by Walter Isaacson, Malcolm Gladwell, Reid Hoffman and Fareed Zakaria, enough to intrigue me.
To my surprise, this book is the best yet on reviewing the ever more tightly woven, connected, pervasive networks – accelerating due to their interactivity – that now dominate our globalized human societies. I also explored how globalization would bring huge surprises in my Paradigms in Progress (1991, 1995) due to the acceleration such interlinking of markets, finance, electronic networks, satellite-enabled communications and trade agreements was creating. I deemed this worldwide mesh of networks to be irreversible and meant that no nation alone could address the new global forces unleashed: from climate change to rising social movements. Human survival would depend on a new cooperative world order based on multiple layers of new rules, agreements and treaties envisioned in Building a Win-Win World.