Lawrence R. Samuel - Future Trends: A Guide to Decision Making and Leadership in Business

Future Trends

Future Trends

A Guide to Decision Making and Leadership in Business

Lawrence R. Samuel

Rowman & Littlefield

Lanham Boulder New York London

Pages 37 of the Introduction were originally published in Lawrence R. Samuel, Future: A Recent History (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009), 16.

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Samuel, Lawrence R., author.

Title: Future trends : a guide to decision making and leadership in business / Lawrence R. Samuel.

Description: Lanham : Rowman & Littlefield, [2018] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017058540 (print) | LCCN 2017060090 (ebook) | ISBN 9781538110362 (electronic) | ISBN 9781538110355 (cloth : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Business forecasting. | Leadership. | Decision making.

Classification: LCC HD30.27 (ebook) | LCC HD30.27 .S26 2018 (print) | DDC 658.4/03dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017058540

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Printed in the United States of America

Introduction

Welcome to the future, or at least a big part of it. Future Trends: A Guide to Decision Making and Leadership in Business is designed to help you be in the right place at the right time with the right ideas. By identifying sixty global, long-term trends and detailing how businesspeople can leverage them through short- and long-range thinking, the book is intended to serve as a powerful and practical body of knowledge. A major goal of Future Trends is to help you be a thought leader in your respective field. Thought leadershiphaving an informed opinion, demonstrating expertise in a particular subject, and serving as an agent of change within ones industryis understandably much pursued in the business community, something on which this book intends to fully capitalize. Insight into the future is the ultimate form of thought leadership, I propose, reason enough that the book should prove to be a useful resource. In a nutshell, this book will offer you a new vocabulary or language to speak in the marketplace and show you how to apply these conversation skills to your particular business or endeavor. By becoming more fluent in the future, readers will have a greater chance of being recognized as a trusted source and go-to person in their field, a valuable proposition.

Future Trends is divided into six sections: Cultural Trends, Economic Trends, Political Trends, Social Trends, Scientific Trends, and Technological Trends. Each section includes ten trends that indicate where the world is heading. Many futurists focus on technology, ignoring the fact that the ways in which people actually live their lives are shaped by many other factors. The book thus takes a 360-degree, holistic view of tomorrow, offering readers a fuller understanding of life on earth over the next couple of decades. And rather than pursue a particular agendaanother common feature in futurism Future Trends consists of a carefully curated collection of those trends that I believe are most relevant and meaningful for businesspeople.

It is the translation of the sixty Future Trends, however, where I believe Future Trends most stands out. Businesspeople typically have to go through a time- and cost-intensive process to develop a decision-making and leadership platform, and then embark on another round of planning to put that platform into actual practice. Via a correlative set of a dozen implications and opportunities, the book shows how each Future Trend can serve as a foundation for strategic thinking, and how those platforms can be applied in real business settings. Translating the future into meaningful and relevant terms is the key to forward-looking decision making and leadership. Readers should apply their own industry, product or service category, and brand dynamics into the equation, however; this last step is the best way to generate actionable, implementable ideas for a specific business.

Importantly, by focusing on the long term, Future Trends avoids the main problem with most trend-oriented books: datedness. The book steers clear of here-today-gone-tomorrow things and experiences that compose most glimpses into the emerging cultural landscape. There is no mention of whats in or whats out; such short-term thinking has little relevance to sustainable decision making and leadership. Relatedly, viewing the trend universe from a global perspective eschews the narrow, Americentric nature of most sources aimed at a business audience, and the books grounding in reality offers more practicality than that brand of futurism posing wild hypotheticals. More than ever, being in the right place at the right time with the right ideas requires having a vision of what likely lies ahead for the next decade or two on a global basis, something Future Trends is equipped to do. As well, most of the following Future Trends are situated within a historical context, an extremely helpful device that better futurists employ when extending trajectories.

Finally, another way that Future Trends skirts being instantly dated is by focusing on what is driving the trends versus the trends themselves. Many people, even managers, believe trends to be about the latest, the hippest, and the coolest, when in truth they have little or nothing to do with the fashion, hairstyle, band, or drink of the moment. (If something is trending now, you can be sure its not a real trend.) Actual trendsparticular expressions or articulations of a societys values that are in ascent, that is, rising in popularity, status, worth, and powerreveal the seminal patterns or themes of society, telling us where it is headed and what it aspires to become. To that point, rather than being trends for trends sake, Future Trends parses or decodes the fundamental qualities or building blocks of each of the sixty trends included in the book. The result is a much more useful and relevant body of work that readers will be able to apply in their decision-making and leadership process for years to come.

Every present is great with the future, wrote the German mathematician and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz in 1703, explaining why most of us, especially those in the world of business, are so interested in what is likely to come next. It should hardly come as news that the future (i.e., that which is yet to be) has always been viewed as a highly charged cultural site loaded with significance and meaning. The future, David Remnick explained in 1997, consists of stories we tell to amaze ourselves, to give hope to the desperate, to jolt the complacent, implying that thinking about tomorrow really serves the needs of today. The future is indeed always about the present, Remnick continued, a catharsis for what confuses us, what we desire, what we fear. Likewise, prophecies and predictions tell us little or nothing about what will happen, David A. Wilson argues in his History of the Future, but rather tell us a great deal about the fears, hopes, desires, and circumstances of the people who peer into their own future and imagine what it will be like.