amazon.com/widgets/q?_encoding=UTF8ASIN=1451641184Format=_SL160_ID=AsinImageMarketPlace=USServiceVersion=20070822WS=1tag=boingboing" class="alignleft">amazon.com/e/ir?t=boingboingl=as2o=1a=1451641184" width="1" height="1" alt="">David and I spoke with Marina Gorbis about her new book, The Nature of the Future: Dispatches from the Socialstructed World.

When Marina Gorbis was a child, growing up in the Soviet Union, she lived with her sister and widowed mother, a medical doctor at a government clinic in Odessa. Her mother’s salary was meager, and her mother wasn’t a member of the privileged communist party elite, and yet Marina says she and her sister enjoyed a life filled with the arts, good food, fashionable clothes, travel, and education. It was all possible, she says, because her mother knew the value of social capital. “Social connections,” Marina writes, “were a powerful currency that flowed through [my mother’s] network of friends and acquaintances, giving her access to many goods and services and enabling our comfortable, if not luxurious, lifestyle.”

Marina never forgot this lesson about the incredible power of networked individuals, and it directed the course of her professional life. For the past 7 years, Marina has been the executive director of the Institute for the Future, an independent, non-profit research organization and creative design studio in Palo Alto California where David is also a researcher. IFTF helps organizations think about the future to make better decisions in the present.

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