The Center for the Edge, part of Deloitte LLP, helps senior executives make sense of and profit from emerging opportunities on the edge of business and technology. What is created on the edge of the competitive landscape—in terms of technology, geography, demographics, markets—inevitably strikes at the very heart of a business. Its mission is to identify and explore emerging opportunities related to big shifts that aren’t yet on the senior management agenda, but ought to be. While focused on long-term trends and opportunities, it continues to be equally focused on implications for near-term action, the day-to-day environment of executives.

To learn more about the Center and its unique perspective, please click here.

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In The Power of Pull: How Small Moves, Smartly Made, Can Set Big Things in Motion, published by Basic Books (2010), John Hagel III, John Seely Brown, and Lang Davison explain how small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion. Their book provides a key to how all of us —individually and collectively—can turn challenge and stress into opportunity and reward as digital technology remakes our lives.

Simply put, our institutions are fundamentally broken.

They achieved enormous success by harnessing 20th century infrastructures. Only a few institutions are beginning to discover the potential residing in newer infrastructures and technologies like social media.

By harnessing new pull practices and developing new institutional arrangements to support these practices, we have an opportunity to turn growing stress into expanding opportunity.

As individuals, we truly now have the potential to remake our world, not in a way that simply serves our needs, but in a way that deeply honors the potential of all of those around us as well as our own potential.

To harness the potential of pull, we must begin with ourselves as individuals and join together in the long march required to transform our institutions. On the way, we will discover that small moves, smartly made, can set big things in motion.

Click here to see a  video of John Hagel III and John Seely Brown discussing The Power of Pull.

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John Hagel, III serves as Co-Chairman of Strategy and Technology Center of Deloitte & Touche USA LLP. His distinctive expertise involves perspectives on the emergence and evolution of new business models enabled by the Internet, restructuring opportunities created by e-commerce and new approaches to strategy under high uncertainty. John Seely Brown is a visiting scholar and advisor to the Provost at University of Southern California (USC) and the Independent Co-Chairman of the Deloitte Center for the Edge. Prior to that he was the Chief Scientist of Xerox Corporation and the director of its Palo Alto Research Center (PARC)—a position he held for nearly two decades.  Lang Davison is the former editor-in-chief of The McKinsey Quarterly and is the executive director of the Deloitte LLP Center for the Edge. The Silicon Valley-based Center conducts original research and develops substantive points of view for new corporate growth.