Ten Years to Midnight

PricewaterhouseCoopers’s global strategy leader offers a powerful new framework for understanding and resolving the root causes of the 21st century’s most pressing problems.

As global leader for strategy for one of the largest organizations in the history of the world, Blair Sheppard sees humanity as facing four major crises in the next ten years- a crisis of prosperity, a crisis of technology, a crisis of institutions, and a crisis of leadership. In this book, he and his team uncover five factors that underlie these crises, which he calls the ADAPT framework- Asymmetry of wealth; Disruption wrought by technology; Age, both the greying of the population in developed countries and the youth explosion in the developing world; Populism and its rejection of international cooperation and social norms; and Trust, which is increasingly lacking in both our leaders and our institutions.

This book shows how the ADAPT framework helps us identify the most critical elements of each of these four crises. It’s not foretelling a doomsday ten years from now, either–the book points to solutions to these crises that result from the clarity and insight provided by this new understanding.