Below are my blink reactions and main take-a-ways from Naisbitt's book. Anyone read it previously & have other thoughts? If you're interested in borrowing MS, I can burn you a CD...let me know.
- This book is probably required in a good deal of business schools...very focused on different ways of thinking about the economy on a global scale.
- Not having to be right when predicting the future is liberating. Having to be right is a burden and none of us should think we need to be right about the future all the time (at most!).
- The Future is embedded in the present - figuring out what it is, is the difficult part.
- Don't add anything new to your organization without eliminating something (sunsetting anyone?)
- High-tech, high-touch. Every technology needs "a poet". Tech by itself has a negative impact on humanity.
- "Technology ecology". What determines whether or not a technology is accepted & adopted? What is displaced when we do accept a new technology? The author feels many of us have a dysfunctional relationship w/ technology (wait, I have to check my iPhone...just kidding!)
- We often over estimate change in the short term but under estimate change in the long term.
- The newspaper, book, & novel cultures are in serious decline and are being reinvented as a new culture is being invented.
- We're in the midst of a huge shift toward becoming a visual world. Visual literacy is/will be as or more pronounced than the "written word".
- Looking at the future is like putting a jigsaw puzzle together. You can't do it in a linear fashion but have to recognize what disparate pieces go together. Be prepared so that you can recognize the pieces that go together when you come into contact with them.
- Change is local, not top down. Look at the patterns that are emerging locally and extrapolate...these are the "megatrends" in their early forms.
- Great chapter on China and it's booming economy. I could see the people & country changing before my eyes when I was there, just as Naisbitt explained. Nice reminder.