Mind Set!: Reset Your Thinking and See the Future [Englisch] [Gebundene Ausgabe]

Erfolg gibt ihm recht, aber John Nasbitt scheint mir zu sehr in Technologien zu denken, flexibel zwar, aber er erkennt m.E. nicht die wirkliche Revolution unserer Zeit, den tatsächlichen neuen Intellekt: die demokratische, kooperative Wissenssammlung bzw. -anwendung. Jeder hat Zugang, jeder lernt und zusammen entsteht ein Verhalten, das sowohl Gruppen als auch Einzelne stärkt. Durch das Internet.

Vom hohen Thron herunterzukommen und zu erkennen, dass das Geschäft der Zukunftsvorhersage aus den Händen gleitet, das scheint sein Problem. Und nicht ohne (vielleicht unbewussten) Grund fügt er am Ende des Buches einen Brief von Darwin, am Ende seines Lebens geschrieben, ein:

"Bis 30 habe ich es genossen, aber seit vielen Jahren kann ich keine einzige Zeile eines Gedichtes mehr lesen. Mein Verstand scheint zu einer Art Maschine gewesen zu sein, die allgemeine Gesetze filtert. Und könnte ich nochmal leben, ich würde es mir zum Gesetz machen, mehrmals in der Woche Gedichte zu lesen und Musik zu hören. Der Verlust dieser Eigenschaft ist ein Verlust an Glück."

Nichts ist falsch an diesem Buch, bestechend gute Beispiele, irgendwie stimmig alles - und doch: Entscheidendes fehlt. Leider.

as our mind may limit what we see, mindsets are powerful tools to open our minds to see what is actually happening, evolving, and building patterns.

in his new (2006) book he describes his own mindsets, which helped him to arrive at his images of the future. understanding his mindsets is almost like understanding the causes for his 'predictions'.

his eleven mindsets are:
01) while many things change, most things remain constant.
02) the future is embedded in the present.
03) focus on the score of the game.
04) understanding how powerful it is not to have to be right.
05) see the future as a picture puzzle.
06) don't get so far ahead of the parade that people don't know you're in it.
07) resistance to change falls if benefits are real.
08) things that we expect to happen always happen more slowly.
09) you don't get results by solving problems but by exploiting opportunities.
10) don't add unless you subtract.
11) don't forget the ecology of technology.

details you'll find in his book. you should read it.

Before considering if you want to read Mind Set! please realize that this book is quite different from Megatrends, Megatrends Asia, and Megatrends 2000. Those books attempted to describe the key elements of the future world that were still new and unfamiliar at the time: That's the key task of futurists.

Mind Set! by comparison, is a book about the methodology that Professor Naisbitt applies to take the information he gleans from local newspapers to discern the face of tomorrow. Mind Set! concludes with five brief examples of how to uses these methods.

If you are looking for a futurist's view on 2027, this isn't the book for you.

In fact, it's interesting that Professor Naisbitt has written this book at all: Futurist work and interest in it seems to be at quite a low ebb now.

To me, the book's main weakness is that he says less about how to acquire the information he analyzes than in prior books. You have to wonder how long local newspapers accounts will forecast the future: The local newspaper business is dying. To me, it would have been far more interesting to have looked at how the blogosphere can be used to supplement or replace local newspapers for this purpose.

What are the mind sets he uses? Let me paraphrase them so they make more sense:

1. Unimportant everyday details change a lot: the fundamentals of life remain constant. His caution is to avoid getting carried away with seeing temporary trends as permanent changes.

2. The future already exists: you only need to extrapolate from it. This is a hoary point that I assume he got from Peter Drucker.

3. Focus on the score of the game: look at the actual measures. Politicians and newsmakers try to bend our perspectives away from what's happening. The key numbers tell the real story.

4. Understand how powerful it is not to have to be right: massive failures follow those who blindly follow a doctrine (whether fascism or communism).

5. See the future as a picture puzzle: assemble your perspective by seeing how a variety of current trends fit together. Don't rely on any one source to answer the whole question.

6. Don't project ahead of what people can appreciate: otherwise, the new perspective adds no value. Seemingly, an argument in favor of blandness, this is simply the old test of connecting the dots.

7. People will change to gain improvements. It's easy to overestimate resistance, in particular, to new technology that requires us to change our habits.

8. Things that we expect to happen take longer than expected. Remember the forecasts of everyone owning a car-plane in the 1950s? We should be all using them by now.

9. Breakthrough change comes only when someone can exploit an unusual opening, such as happened after the fall of communism. Those who try to solve problems through government action aren't going to be very successful.

10. Don't overload people with perspectives and details.

11. Evaluate technology in terms of the nontechnical constraints.

In each of these sections, Professor Naisbitt provides his aphorism and a few examples. In most cases, I think you'll find the material to be suggestive rather than instructional in nature. If you already have a sense of how to do forecasting, that's okay. If you are totally new, I think you'll be a little at sea.

About 60 percent of the book is then devoted to five future projections where he briefly mentions (one page on each one), the principles he primarily replied on to reach these conclusions. The weakness of this section is that the conclusions are so obvious as to make you feel like futurism is a waste of time. It would have made more sense to pick less obvious areas for demonstrating his conclusions.

1. Videos, attractive designs, use of color, and visual imagery are replacing the written word as a key influence.

2. Industries are organizing globally for supply, distribution, and production rather than by nation.

3. China's economic growth will continue, to be followed by political freedom. The nation will become a global design and branding base, rather than just a source of low-cost production labor.

4. Europe will experience slow growth, burdened with below-replacement birth rates, tough policies against immigration, and high social welfare costs.

5. The importance of new technologies will slow down while the application of technologies developed in recent years will accelerate. Although he doesn't directly say it, biotechnology and nanotechnology are immensely slow methods of invention. He sees nothing else on the horizon that could cause a sudden shift. This is a good point. Generally, technology takes forever to move into mainstream application.

After having read this review, I also think you need to consider what the role of the futurist is: Perhaps they just keep us from jumping on trendy ideas too far. That can be good. Most of the biggest corporate crack-ups I've seen up close came because the leaders believed the world was going to change faster than it did. They raced ahead to serve markets then that still don't exist.