Three books

This was originally posted on my own site.

Lurking: How a Person Became a User by Joanne McNeil will be published on February 25th.

In Lurking, Joanne McNeil digs deep and identifies the primary (if sometimes contradictory) concerns of people online: searching, safety, privacy, identity, community, anonymity, and visibility. She charts what it is that brought people online and what keeps us here even as the social equations of digital life — what we’re made to trade, knowingly or otherwise, for the benefits of the internet — have shifted radically beneath us. It is a story we are accustomed to hearing as tales of entrepreneurs and visionaries and dynamic and powerful corporations, but there is a more profound, intimate story that hasn’t yet been told.

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson will be published on May 12th:

Henry Every was the seventeenth century’s most notorious pirate. The press published wildly popular — and wildly inaccurate — reports of his nefarious adventures. The British government offered enormous bounties for his capture, alive or (preferably) dead. But Steven Johnson argues that Every’s most lasting legacy was his inadvertent triggering of a major shift in the global economy. Enemy of All Mankind focuses on one key event — the attack on an Indian treasure ship by Every and his crew — and its surprising repercussions across time and space. It’s the gripping tale one of the most lucrative crimes in history, the first international manhunt, and the trial of the seventeenth century.

How To Future: Leading and Sense-Making in an Age of Hyperchange by Scott Smith with Madeline Ashby will be published on July 3rd:

Successfully designing for a future requires a picture of that future — a useful map of the horizons ahead that can be used for wayfinding, identifying emerging opportunities or risks. Accurately developing this map means investing in better awareness of signals about the future, understanding trends in context, developing rich insights about what those signals indicate — relative to companies, people, citizens or stakeholders. It also means cultivating ways to share these future insights through tangible yet provocative scenarios or stories, turn these into prototypes, or connect them to strategies.

This was originally posted on my own site.