Future Trends: A Guide to Decision Making and Leadership in Business

Samuel (Boomers 3.0), a consultant and futurist, identifies 60 long-term global trends that, when grouped together, will provide savvy business leaders with a “useful guide to the economic, political, social, scientific, and technological landscape that looms ahead.” With minimal preamble, he launches right into his list, noting the implications and opportunities of each entry. For the first, individualism, these respectively include the “weakening of large institutions” and the (rather vaguely defined) chance to orient one’s business around “the supreme power of the self.” Other cultural trends involve secularization, acceleration, “less-is-more,” and androgyny. Economic trends, Samuel explains, will be dominated by the laissez-faire approach to regulation, driving the related trend of polarization between rich and poor, and will also include the proliferation of e-currency. As one might anticipate, political trends include instability and populism. Social trends encompass “omniculturism” in the U.S., which will prevent marketers from “dividing the American pie into neat slices defined by an individual’s race or ethnicity” as they did previously, and urbanization throughout the world, while scientific trends include space exploration, and technological trends center on automation and biometrics-based security. Businesspeople will come away with exciting new ideas from Samuel’s predictions. (July)