The installation of new bookshelves in our home meant, of course, that I had to rearrange the books. In sorting through the stacks, I came across a tattered paperback copy of John Naisbitt’s bestseller, Megatrends, first published in 1982. This will be good for a laugh, I thought.
Predictions that go awry are the stuff of legend. When President Rutherford Hayes was shown Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, he said, “That’s an amazing invention, but who would ever want to use one of them?” Radio Times editor Rex Lambert in 1936 dismissed another new invention by proclaiming, “Television won’t matter in your lifetime or mine.” Charles Duell, head of the U.S. Patent Office, famously closed it down for three years in 1899, explaining, “Everything that can be invented, has been invented.”
So I started thumbing through Naisbitt’s book with expectations of a good chortle. But what I encountered astonished me. Let me remind you of Naisbitt’s ten major—mega—trends from 25 years ago:
From an industrial society to information society. “In the computer age we are dealing with conceptual space connected by electronics, rather than physical space connected by the motorcar.” This statement seems old hat now, but at the start of 1982 only two million personal computers had been sold. The World Wide Web was created in 1989.
From forced technology to high-tech/high-touch. “The more high technology around us, the more the need for human touch.” Which is why our company has two live receptionists answering the phones.
From a national economy to a world economy. “To be really successful, you will have to be trilingual: English, Spanish, and the computer.”
From short-term to long-term. “The question for the 1980s is, ‘What business are you really in?’”
From centralization to decentralization. “Celebrating our geographical roots as part of the decentralization trend has inspired the phenomenal rise of state, city, and regional magazines.”
From institutional help to self-help. Home schooling. Hospices. Private security guards. Consumerism. “The macroeconomics of the industrial-welfare state is yielding to the microeconomics of the information self-help state.”
From representative democracy to participatory democracy. “The new leader is a facilitator, not an order giver.”
From hierarchies to networking. “We will restructure our businesses into smaller and smaller units, more entrepreneurial units, more participatory units.”
From north to south. “For economic growth, give me California, Texas, and Florida, and you can have the other 47.”
From either/or to multiple option. “… [I]t means there can be a market for just about everything.”
By now, you have to agree with me that this is remarkable. Naisbitt explains that his methodology was fairly simple. He studied carefully things that were already going on, often on a subterranean level, in society and extrapolated what their eventual impact would be. In other words, the trends were out there; he merely discovered and tried to understand them, which is what anyone in a leadership position has to do today. (Naisbitt’s latest book, Mind Set!: Reset Your Thinking and See the Future, was published last October.)
As for our company, we follow the advice of Alan Kay, the famous guru at the Palo Alto Research Center, who in 1971 said, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn’t violate too many of Newton’s Laws.”
