Surprise! Confronting Unknown Unknowns in Nature, Business and Everyday Life

Terapoint has eight major sections, each filled with examples of resilience and transformation in action.
"Here in the Real World" describes the role of unknown events (called "X-events") in creating opportunity for evolution. Casti shares accounts from the lives of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and "Colonel" Harland Sanders, and explains how to ensure survival and prosperity in a volatile world.
"Mountaintops and Butterflies" delves more deeply into complexity and mass psychology as drivers of X-events.
"Up Close and Personal" hones in on personal crises (e.g. loss of job, home, health, partner) as X-events, and how to find the silver lining in X-events for the benefit of one's physical, mental, emotional, and financial health.
"Prosperity on the Edge of Crisis" describes the resilient corporation, using examples from Nokia, Microsoft, Apple, and KFC.
"When It All Comes Crashing Down" explores previous X-events and megatrends (e.g. fall of the Berlin Wall, WWII, the American Revolution, the rise of China as an economic power) and predicts low-likelihood, high-impact events (the end of globalization; the destabilization of the global financial system; the collapse of democracy).
"Cutting Things Down to Size" examines crises of natural resources, including escalating food prices, crayfish farms in Sweden, spruce forests in Canada, and beef cattle herds in New Zealand.
"Resilience is THE Word" provides readers with tools to assimilate, survive, adapt, and anticipate.
The author summarizes with a new paradigm for human social processes.