Seeing Around Corners

Seeing Around Corners: Six Decades of Adventures Leading Application of Technology Innovations – Including the AI Revolution.

  • Author: Jack Spain
  • Publisher: Spain Business Advisors
  • Publication Date: Targeting Summer 2025

I have found myself at the leading edge of technology innovations since the beginning of my career fifty years ago. I included a chapter titled “On Tales of Innovation and Leading Change” in my fifth book, “Different Tracks: Lessons from a Diverse Career Journey” that was the spark that inspired this new book. My plan is to incorporate research on the leading technology-related innovations over the past two thousand years and intertwine these innovations with my personal experience in exploring and deploying technology innovations beginning in the mid 1970s. 

My initial concept for a title of this book is “Seeing Around Corners”, in other words, having an innate instinct on how emerging innovations will have a practical impact on businesses, employees, and the public in general. This instinct is based on a combination of:

  1. Being very proactive in investing in my own education and general knowledge as a lifelong learner starting with entering college in the mid-1970s and capitalizing on thousands of additional hours in training and hands-on learning opportunities. I also pivoted in my late-20s to be a very dedicated and disciplined daily reader of journals, books, periodicals, and papers across many diverse disciplines. For example: 
  • Reading over 600 books on technology, business, management, and leadership since the early 1980s;
  • Participating in what I estimate of over 6,000 hours of formal training courses post bachelor’s degree
  • Participating in and speaking at dozens of industry events;
  • Writing hundreds of reports and white papers;
  • Publishing five books on technology and leadership-related topics;
  • Delivering professional consulting services to over 100 organizations.
  1. Taking a very proactive approach to my role as a leader in technology-related businesses throughout my career which have included:
  • Leading technology organizations from 3 to over 100 employees in both global Fortune 100 corporate IT roles along with industry leading software and software as a service (SaaS) companies in technology, marketing, product marketing, product, engineering, sales, sales enablement, and business development leader roles along with COO and CEO positions;
  • Constantly searching for new learning opportunities and intentionally worked myself in and out of multiple leadership roles by training and hiring qualified employees to backfill my various roles;
  • Intentionally seeking out leadership roles to proactively create new organizations to manage and support emerging technologies;
  • Continually seeking opportunities for the impactful application of new technology innovations that delivered tangible business value;
  • And, largely committing a sixty plus hour work-week towards my professional endeavors throughout the past five decades as an accelerator to “10,000 Hours to Master Something” as noted by Malcolm Gladwell to achieve mastery in a discipline. 
  1. And thirdly, in my humble opinion, being in the right place, or company, at the right time; willing to take on professional risks head-on from an early age; and having the intuition to recognize and capitalize on the opportunity to deploy the right technology innovation. I associate this third ingredient as “serendipity”. Serendipity occurs only when you’re totally invested in the game and requires commitment, grit, and resilience. Resilience is required because no one believes a prophet / change leader / seer in her or his time.

My goal with the majority of the content in this book is to weave the innovations that I have been fortunate to capitalize on during the past five decades with the most significant, impactful, and notable technological innovations from this period.

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