Our intuition on how the world works could well be wrong. We are surprised when new competitors burst on the scene, or businesses protected by large and deep moats find their defences easily breached, or vast new markets are conjured from nothing. Trend lines resemble saw-tooth mountain ridges.The world not only feels different. The data tell us it is different. Based on years of research by the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute, No Ordinary Disruption: The Four Forces Breaking all the Trends is a timely and important analysis of how we need to reset our intuition as a result of four forces colliding and transforming the global economy: the rise of emerging markets, the accelerating impact of technology on the natural forces of market competition, an aging world population, and accelerating flows of trade, capital and people.Our intuitions formed during a uniquely benign period for the world economy,often termed the Great Moderation. Asset prices were rising, cost of capital was falling, labour and resources were abundant, and generation after generation was growing up more prosperous than their parents.But the Great Moderation has gone. The cost of capital may rise. The price of everything from grain to steel may become more volatile. The world's labour force could shrink. Individuals, particularly those with low job skills, are at risk of growing up poorer than their parents.What sets No Ordinary Disruption apart is depth of analysis combined with lively writing informed by surprising, memorable insights that enable us to quickly grasp the disruptive forces at work. For evidence of the shift to emerging markets, consider the startling fact that, by 2025, a single regional city in China,Tianjin,will have a GDP equal to that of the Sweden, of that, in the decades ahead, half of the world's economic growth will comefrom 440 cities including Kumasi in Ghana or Santa Carina in Brazil that most executives today would be hard-pressed to locate on a map.What we are now seeing is no ordinary disruption but the new facts of business life, facts that require executives and leaders at all levels to reset their operating assumptions and management intuition.

The dramatic fall of Blackberry and the stunning rise of What'sApp; the almost overnight emergence of "Single's Day" (Nov. 11), a contrived holiday in China, as the biggest online shopping day in the world, and the similarly from-out-of-nowhere rise of the U.S. as the world's newest petro-power: Are there common threads running through these big, important, stories? "Yes." Ours is an era of near constant discontinuity. Today and even more so in the years ahead, speed, surprise, and sudden shifts in direction in huge global markets will routinely shape the destinies of established companies and provide opportunities for new entrants. Business models can be up-ended in months. Competitors can rise in almost complete stealth and burst upon the scene. Businesses that were protected by large and deep moats now find their defenses are easily breached. New markets are conjured seemingly from nothing. Technology and globalization have put the natural forces of market competition on steroids. This isn't just how the world now feels; it's also what the data tell us. Chart the plot points on most long-term trends and they no longer look like smooth upward slopes; they look like sawtooth mountain ridges, or like hockey sticks, breaking up sharply and to the right, or like the silhouette of Mt. Fuji, rising steadily only to start falling off. We live, increasingly, in an age of trend breaks. In "No Ordinary Disruption," the directors of the McKinsey Global Institute, the flagship think tank of the world's leading consulting firm, McKinsey & Company, dive deeply behind current headlines to analyze the key forces transforming the global economy over the next two decades--and most importantly, to explain what business and government leaders need to do to reset their intuitions and take advantage of the disruptions ahead. Free of jargon and gimmicks, filled with anecdotes, data, and graphics, informed by deep experience, "No Ordinary Disruption" is aimed at a broad audience of middle and senior level managers, investors, and policy makers.