In his seminal works Megatrends and Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt proved himself one of the most far-sighted and accurate observers of our fast-changing world.
Mind Set! goes beyond that—Mind Set! discloses the secret of forecasting. John Naisbitt gives away the keys to the kingdom, opening the door to the insights that let him understand today's world and see the opportunities of tomorrow. He selects his most effective tools, 11 Mindsets, and applies them by guiding the reader through the five forces that will dominate the next decades of the twenty-first century.
Illustrated by stories about Galileo and Einstein to today's icons and rebels in business, science, and sports, Mind Set! opens your eyes to see beyond media headlines, political slogans, and personal opinions to select and judge what will form the pictures of the future.
On August 8, 2006, Amazon.com listed 56,170 book titles under change, 11,195 titles under business change, and 2,404 titles under global change. An uncountable number of newspapers, magazines, and 24-hour news channels leave not one stone unturned, promoting the idea that everything is changing. Now, who in the world can keep up with this? No one can.
Don't bother.
Think about it: Most businesses stay in a steady state, day in and day out, year in and year out. Yes, products and markets have been altered, mostly for the better, and the tools we use have changed. But despite the avalanche of business books, business practices—the basics of buying and selling, of making a profit as a necessary condition of survival—have remained much the same during my 40 years of involvement.
Whether cell phones can display television and calls are made via the Internet, your bathtub filled by taking off your clothes, or your refrigerator opened by a rumble in your stomach, these are just other ways of doing what we do—easier, faster, farther, more, and longer—and not the substance of our lives. We go to school, get married, and have kids and send them to school, which, God knows, does not change despite the chanting for school reform. Home, family, and work are the great constants.
Life on a sugar beet farm has not changed too much since my boyhood. As ever, the seasons determine the rhythm of life, although modern equipment has eased sowing and harvesting. Most of the farmers still raise chickens and keep farm animals, only the horses in my time used for transport and work are more often kept for leisure and delight. In the ups and downs of life my parents were trying to make their living, educate their children as best they could, all in the frame of their potential and with the tools of their time.
At the beginning of their 11-volume Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant say:
Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting and doing things historians usually record, while on the banks, unnoticed, people build homes, make love, raise their predictable children, sing songs, write poetry and even whittle statues.
The story of civilization is the story of what happened on the banks.
The difference between what and how
Have you ever made a list of what changes or is likely to change? Hold on—not a list of how we do things, but what we do.
Returning to farming, what has changed is how agriculture is practiced. Advancement is dependent on how flexible farmers adapt their skills to new technologies and changing consumer behavior. But farmers stay what they are, farmers, although there are differences in how they farm. Some find their niche, adapting to changing demands in the market, like Chino's, whose delicate organic vegetables and fruits are flown to celebrity cooks like Wolfgang Puck in Los Angeles. Others, for various reasons, have not made it and have given up farming.
Most change is not in what we do, but how we do it. Within all the hype, the more we are able to differentiate between constants and change, the more effectively we will be able to react to new markets and profit from change.Sports are a good example.
The rules of team sports remain fairly constant—with only very small changes from time to time. The changes we do make often come from a change in the way players play their game. A well-known big change was the popularization of the modern forward pass in football by Knute Rockne in the 1920s. The goal was still to get a touchdown, but how players could get to the goal line changed.
“John Naisbitt’s bestseller Megatrends was published with astonishingly precise predictions. He did not go wrong with a single one.”
