In episode 1 of our new "Future-Proof" podcast, we talked to Daniel Burrus, New York Times best-selling author and futurist to Fortune 500 companies – but more to the point, the man who created The Anticipatory Organization.

This is a revolutionary new learning system that actually teaches business leaders how to spot future trends before they happen and identify the opportunities they offer early, so we can become more future-ready. It’s almost like predicting the future is a skill we can learn, and Daniel’s system teaches it in really remarkable detail.

Today’s guest, Joey Havens, executive partner of HORNE LLP, was one of the earliest evangelists of The Anticipatory Organization – or AO, as we call it. He immediately grasped the concept, and the potential.

He asked everyone in his firm to go through the system and learn what they could, and in a nutshell, it transformed the firm. Joey has since fully embraced this whole concept of anticipation, and he has demanded that his firm embraces it, too.

In this conversation, we cover:

• What connected Joey to this concept of future-readiness?
• How do you get there, at a firm-wide level?
• What does it look like in action?
• How can we all work to become a little more future-ready?

[embed]http://traffic.libsyn.com/futureready/Ep_7_-_Joey_Havens.mp3[/embed]

The future is now Google recently revealed the Google Assistant, Google’s A.I.-powered home assistant akin to Amazon's Echo, in a presentation in which Google Assistant actually made a phone call and had a conversation with a real human being — who doesn’t know she’s talking to a machine.

Check it out in the video below:

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/embed/D5VN56jQMWM[/embed]

This is a machine capable of understanding the nuances of not only human speech, but of human conversation.

This is what it looks like when our current technologies advance at an exponential pace, which begs the question: If this is what’s happening now, and this technology is advancing exponentially, what’s going to be happening tomorrow?

Learning how to anticipate tomorrow Anticipating the future is a skill set that you can learn – and if you want to ready for the future of the accounting and finance professions, it’s a skill that you will probably *have* to learn. Reacting to changes in technology and the market isn’t good enough anymore.

“If you’re going to be anticipatory, you have to have deliberate practice to be a star.”

If you want to transform your accounting or financing organization into an Anticipatory Organization, head over to blionline.org/ao to find an applied version of The Anticipatory Organization Learning System, a training process that helps executives and their teams turn disruption into a competitive advantage.

And if you don’t already have a copy of The Anticipatory Organization by Daniel Burrus, you can get your own copy for free (plus shipping and handling) at TheAOBook.com.

Resources:

• Learn more at HorneLLP.com.
• Read more from Joey: “Practice Makes a Star”
• Read more from Joey: “ENOUGH with the FCC”
• The Anticipatory Organization Learning System