Susskind Richard - The Future of the Professions

A swashbuckling journey through the professions, this book makes sense of sweeping changes going on today and helps us see what it will mean to be a professional in an era of ubiquitous knowledge and increasingly capable machines. The authors rigorous skepticism reveals an astounding future.

Hugh Verrier, Chairman, White & Case

Many books about the future are shallow and unnecessarily alarmist. This book is neither. We are behaving like ostriches in the developed world, refusing to see that technology is on the cusp of fundamentally reshaping professions. The future is bright, but only if we start embracing, rather than shunning, the future which the Susskinds show is hurtling towards us.

Sir Anthony Seldon, Vice-Chancellor, University of Buckingham, and former Master of Wellington College

If you want to know how technology will continue to transform our lives, read this book! Well researched, beautifully written, comprehensive, insightful, and encouraging, the authors convincingly make the case that no profession is immune to these monumental changes, and that they provide an unprecedented opportunity for those who embrace rather than resist them.

Professor Nicholas F. LaRusso, MD, Founding Medical Director of the Mayo Clinic Center for Innovation

In the tax profession we have seen transformational change, striking at the very foundations of what we do and how we do it. In this compelling work, the Susskinds help us think more clearly about the crucial issues and opportunities we face and set clear insight as to the way in which we must respond. Essential reading for anyone interested in the future of a professional organization.

Conrad Young, Deloitte Global Leader, Tax Management Consulting

Professions beware! In this insightful and thought-provoking book, Richard and Daniel Susskind capture the essence of todays changing environment where, whilst the destination may not be certain, it is clear the status quo will not survive. Technology in particular is having a profound impact across the professions and no group seems exempt. The future has never been so ripe with challenges and opportunities.

Richard Sexton, Vice Chairman, Global Assurance, PwC

It is unusual for a father and son to write a book together. Before thanking the many people who helped us with this book, we thought readers would be interested to learn a little about the background to our collaboration.

For more than thirty years, I have been working on transforming the way that lawyers and courts work. I have written eight related books, and many of my theories about the future of legal services are no longer considered outrageous. Over the years, and around the world, at the end of my lectures to lawyers, I have been approached by stray doctors, auditors, architects, and many others who have said that my ideas apply equally to their own professions. I have had similar feedback in my consulting work with leading tax and audit specialists, and from my work as a university professor and school governor in the education sector. The starting-point for the research underpinning the book, therefore, is a well-tested and substantially corroborated set of ideas about the future of legal services that other professionals say resonates beyond law. One main purpose of the book is to test and extend this hypothesis about the law and lawyers to the professions more generally.

Above all, the project that led to this book has allowed me to work intensely with my son, Daniel. Very few fathers have this opportunity. It has been the high point of my working life.

Five years have passed since my Dad and I first sat down to talk about this book. He had spent most of his career thinking about the future of the legal profession. But, for a while, he had sensed that his thinking applied equally well elsewhere. At the time I was working in the Policy Unit in 10 Downing Street. As we talked, it became very clear that my experience in government confirmed his suspicions. And so we decided to set off on a project, together, to think about the future of the professions. It has been an extraordinarily happy five years, and a great privilege.

This book is written in the first person plural. This reflects the fact that our views are shared views, so that when we say that we believe, we see, or we predict, then our positions are indeed aligned. However, we accept that our use of we in the past tense is sometimes anomalous. For example, where we speak of what we wrote in the mid-1980s, one of us (Daniel) was not yet alive. Nonetheless, as a convention throughout the book, when we speak of we, we may be referring, variously, to our joint views or experience or those of either one of us.