Long Fuse, Big Bang: Achieving Long-Term Success Through Daily Victories - Hardcover

Haseltine, Eric

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1401323634 ISBN 13: 9781401323639

Publisher: Hyperion, 2010

Synopsis

“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.” —Henry Ford

As one part of your brain processes these words, another part of your brain is urging you to put the book down and focus on something more pressing. Get back to work on the budget due tomorrow. Answer e-mails growing stale in your inbox. Get off your rear and update that rÉsumÉ.

We’re all guilty of it, especially in the business world. From Fortune 500 CEOs to assistants, we work to solve the most urgent problems first. That’s because evolution has hardwired our brains to focus only on the immediate future, a survival technique that worked extremely well when predators were lurking at every turn.

But that was then, this is now. In the modern world, where life expectancies are long and physical perils rare (at least for people who buy books), it's not only possible to build a strong tomorrow without sacrificing today, but to actually increase the number of here-and-now victories by pursuing distant wins.

That’s where Long Fuse, Big Bang comes in—to help you work with that instinct to create and foster ideas that will lead to explosive professional results. Through proven case studies and personal experience, Dr. Eric Haseltine shows you how to neutralize the quick-fix way of thinking and actually use that desire to improve your chances of an enduring success. Rather than fight our most basic thought processes, this book will teach you how to work with your brain to light the long fuse, keep it smoldering, and ignite that “Big Bang” that will make history.

About this title

About the Author:

Eric Haseltine is the President and Managing Partner of Haseltine Partners LLC. He has held the position of Director of Research at National Security Agency as well as Associate Director for Science and Technology and Director of National Intelligence. In 2001, Eric was the Executive Vice President of Walt Disney Imagineering and director of engineering for Hughes Aircraft. Eric has 15 patents in optics, special effects and electronic media, and authored more than 100 publications. Haseltine received his B.A. in economics and psychology from the UC Berkley and his Ph.D. in physiological psychology from Indiana University. He lives in Silver Spring, MD.

From Publishers Weekly:

Haseltine's studies of the brain have aided him in senior positions with the NSA, Disney Imagineering, and Hughes Aircraft and make this a scholarly, packed analysis. Relying on his own experiences and case studies of pioneering companies like IBM, Disney, and Wal-Mart, Haseltine makes a convincing case that our short-term, put-out-the-fire mentality makes us miss opportunities that come from long-term thinking. In compelling, well-researched examples from a number of fields, Haseltine demonstrates how the successes of today were once the dream projects of visionary leaders who broke their ideas down and organized them into daily increments that allowed them to be approached methodically. Walt Disney, Haseltine points out, understood that "speaking to the heart works much better than speaking to the mind," because our conscious mind is "a Post-it note" compared to the unconscious, which he likens to the "Library of Congress." It's not what we do on a daily basis, he argues, but how we do it. (July) (c)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About this edition

• Publisher: Hyperion
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 1401323634
• ISBN 13: 9781401323639
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 272