Читать книгу Non-Obvious 2018 Edition - Рохит Бхаргава - Страница 48

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“The most reliable way to anticipate the future

is to understand the present.”

JOHN NAISBITT, Futurist and Author of Megatrends

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

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 advent of 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 ten major shifts described in Megatrends 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 more than 14 million copies sold worldwide, it’s still the single bestselling book about the future published in the last forty years.

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,” even noting that he had a habit of scanning “hundreds of newspapers and magazines, from Scientific American to Tricycle, a Buddhism magazine” in search of new ideas.¹

John Naisbitt was and still is (at a spry eighty-eight!) a collector of ideas. For years, his ideology has inspired me to think about the world with a similarly broad lens and has helped me to develop the process I use for my own trend work, which I call the Haystack Method.