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The selection of executive staff has long been a concern of successful businesses. In the early 1950s, William H. Whyte, Jr., wrote in Fortune magazine of how corporations carefully screened spouses as well as executive candidates in efforts to safeguard the corporations' futures. He then went on to portray the struggles of those aspiring to such positions in his classic novel The Organization Man (1956). By the 1980s, executive selection had become so important that search firms had proliferated and corporate CEOs like General Electric's Jack Welch were receiving national recognition for their executive succession strategies.

The turbulence enveloping so many organizations today makes it increasingly likely that learning from one’s experience may be both too slow and too embedded in rapidly obsolescing frameworks. Addresses the dilemmas of learning under such conditions of rapid change. Presents an argument for the need for leaders to time travel, to link the future, past, and present to each other even as those links seem frail, even ruptured. Explicates a technique called “histories of the future” that has people locate themselves at some distance in the future (five to ten years), in a specific context and imaginatively look back over the time period. By having several people improvisationally develop a “history of the future” the organization can often invent options that are a rich mix of serendipity and rational thinking. Vivid histories of the future enable people to construct rich narratives, to look at imaged actions, mistakes, successes, moves and countermoves, threats and opportunities in the wider environment, then to step back and connect current points to these possible futures. Reviews the literature on organizational learning that is relevant to the issue of learning for the future in dramatically different environments and suggests why the time travelling skills of leadership are key to helping people prepare for novel challenges.

This issue is a selected bibliography covering the subject of leadership.

I felt myself the recipient of a great honour when asked to read a paper on this subject before your Society. One difficulty, however, at once confronted me, and that was that what your society might regard as an act of sophistication of food, I might believe to be only a perfectly legitimate manufacturing improvement. I had no wish to masquerade before you as a wolf in sheep's clothing, and therefore stated my position to your secretary. As a result of some correspondence, I think that he, as your representative, and I, both felt that granted such differences of opinion, they themselves constituted one of the strongest arguments in favour of the formation of a Court of Reference. There are, no doubt, many processes which are considered by their inventors and users as of advantage in the manufacture of food, whereas others regard them with the greatest distrust and aversion. In most cases I believe the members of both these classes to be high‐minded and honourable men. That being so, it is submitted that the best method of arriving at the real facts is the establishment of an impartial, broad‐minded, and capable Court of Reference, to which such matters should be submitted for examination and decision.