Marian Salzman - The New Megatrends: Seeing Clearly in the Age of Disruption

You can think of this book as a time travelers guide.

It will take you back twenty years to the turn of the millennium, unpacking the pivotal events in the period of disruption that followed before transporting you forward to two decades after the Great Reset of the present day. With this time span supplying our observational bookends, I will explore how world affairs, technological innovation, social movements, and a pandemic have combined to create trends that are shifting our identities, shaping our collective future, and recasting our past.

Are you keen to understand how the recent past will influence the trends that shape tomorrow? Are you an entrepreneur or a leader looking for an edge by anticipating and responding early to cultural shifts that offer promise or peril? Are you prepared to tackle cold, hard truths today rather than pretending looming catastrophes will magically disappear? If so, this book is for you.

My aim is to help you understand the forces that have led to a world facing widespread dissatisfaction and even the threat of systemic collapse and, crucially, to offer insights into how we might turn things around before it is too late. For reasons I will explain in the introduction, the end point of my forecasts is 2038a timeframe that allows me to make evidence-based predictions without venturing into the murky territory of science fiction.

I refer throughout to cultural trends, business trends, and consumer trends, using them as illustrations and markers to guide you into a global future that will be characterized by unprecedented change and even chaos. These sightings draw on my experiences as a longtime trendspotter, a professional communicator and observer of people, and someone who lives simultaneously on two continents, in three hometowns, and nowhere at all.

Often the word trend carries a superficial connotation, as when it is applied to shifting appetites in entertainment, fashion, and vocabulary. This book will dip into those realms, but they are not its focus. Any serious effort to forecast the future today must necessarily grapple with the weightier issues of climate change, technology use, and polarizationaspects of life that trickle down into every facet of our culture. Forewarned, forearmed; to be prepared is half the victory. Cervantes had it right.

People often ask what it is like to have worked in and around trends for almost four decades. I am reminded that it has been a journey marked by a series of robust immersions and unexpected (sometimes unwelcome) detours. I learned about globalism and deregulation during the Big Banga moment of sudden financial deregulation in the 1980s. I hitchhiked the scantly populated information superhighway in the early 1990s and launched the first market-research company in cyberspace. I lived and worked in the Netherlands when European unification was the next big thing and the polder model, championing consensus decision-making, was coming to the fore. I moved back to New York full-time in 1998 (but kept a base and a team in the Netherlands for a few more years, never completely breaking ties with Holland) and watched the Twin Towers collapse two miles from my loft in September 2001. (When the planes hit, the first person I called after my parents was my executive assistant in Amsterdam; she still recalls my fear and anxiety.) My consumer research into metrosexuality hit a nerve and unleashed a global media explosion. Many years later, I helped promote the launch of Venture for America, whose founder, Andrew Yang, through his unlikely presidential campaign, introduced much of the United States and even some non-Americans to the concept of a universal basic income.

A friend once described me as Forrest Gump lite. In truth, many people have found themselves similarly caught in multiple threads of history in the making. The difference for me is that these threads are not left unexamined. My job as a trends analyst is to untangle and rearrange these strands into a road map that will help us move forward in a reasoned way.

One caveat before you dig in: It is my style to make nonlinear leaps as I lay out possible and probable scenarios and contemplate what has led up to them and how they might develop. Zigs and zags through peaks and valleys reflect the increasingly complex nature of these times. While I always keep a close eye on the United States, a country that has given rise to countless cultural movements in the past fifty years, the predictions contained herein are global in nature. Much of the beauty of trendspotting lies in soaking in the views along the way. But even with some colorful diversions, I promise that I ultimately will deliver you to a destination worth ponderingand a potential future worth fighting for.