Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2017 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 45

“THE MOST RELIABLE WAY TO ANTICIPATE THE FUTURE

IS THE UNDERSTAND THE PRESENT.”

—JOHN NAISBITT,

Futurist and Author of Megatrends

In 1982, a single book called Megatrends changed the way governments, businesses and people thought about the future.

In the book, author John Naisbitt was one of the first to predict our evolution from an industrial society to an information society, and he did so more than a decade before the Internet. He also predicted the shift from hierarchies to networks and the rise of the global economy.

Despite the book’s unapologetic American-style optimism, most of the 10 major shifts described in the book were so far ahead of their time that when it was first released one reviewer glowingly described it as “the next best thing to a crystal ball.” With over 14 million copies sold worldwide, it is still the single best-selling book about the future published in the last 40 years.

In the decades since the book came out, Naisbitt has been asked the same question in dozens of interviews with the media: how did he develop his ability to predict the future and could others learn to do it?

For his part, Naisbitt believed deeply in the power of observation to understand the present before trying to predict the future (as the opening quote to this chapter illustrates). In interviews, friends and family often described Naisbitt as having a “boundless curiosity about people, cultures and organizations.”

A profile piece in USA Today back in 2006 even noted his penchant for scanning “hundreds of newspapers and magazines, from Scientific American to Tricycle, a Buddhism magazine” as a symbol of his incessant desire to learn.

John Naisbitt was and still is (at the age of 87!) a collector of ideas. His thinking has inspired me for years to think about the world with a similarly broad lens and to develop the process I use for my own trend work: the Haystack Method.