1. The 21st century will be the century of change. More things will change in more places in the next 10 years than in the previous 100. While many things change most things will remain constant. For example, people will still read paperback books in 10 years and publisher will print more books at a stagger pace.
2. The future is embedded in the present. The future being embedded in the present does not mean extrapolating everything into the future. It means finding seeds of the future in the ground and not in the wide sky. In other words, change will take time and don’t get to far from what the crowd thinks and is demanding as emerging trends, products and services.
3. Fads themselves are embedded in trends and are a manifestation of trends. Shifts in trends do not occur very often, but the fads that the trends have embedded inspire change of the time- thus the word faddish; for example, the shift from the industrial society to the informational society. Among other things, this shift has meant that we have become predominantly sedentary workers. Workers are concerned about physical exercise and about what they eat, diet. Dieting is outrageously faddish.
4. The emerging individualism in the world is reflected in the reduction in membership in organized unions and growing affluence. Unions did not reinvent or reconceptualize their role and so U.S labor unions went from 25 percent to 7.8 percent in the private sector as is still falling. Confluence forces are the key. Always ask yourself if there are enough different forces at work pushing in the same direction, before you make a judgment.
5. The great source of knowledge about the future is the newspapers. Look at newspapers as if you were reading them 100 years from now.
6. Focus on the game score. Germany is behind in the economic score. Germany economy has no growth at all, zero, the sick man of Europe. In every single year since the announcement in 2000, Europe has lost economic ground against the United States.
7. GM is a horrible bind with a $1,600 per vehicle handicap in legacy costs, mostly health and pension benefits. Normally a company in such straits would contract until it reaches equilibrium: 4 million cars instead of 5.1 million and reducing U.S market share to 20 percent, a worker cost-competitive health-care plan, layoffs, and returning profit into auto sales and financing operations. However, Union agreements don’t allow the automaker to close plants or lay off workers without paying a stiff penalty, no matter how far its sales or profits fall.
8. Immigration is constantly replenishing US talent pool and it isn’t chance that the US has 300 Nobel Prize winners.
9. It is powerful to understand that one does not have to be right. “Authority slavery is one of the biggest enemies of truth.” Listening is an essential skill. Einstein inconsequential babble resulting in four papers that changed the world of physics: 1. energy properties of light 2. true size of an atom 3. bodies of order of magnitude 1/1000 mm suspended in liquids 4. electrodynamics of moving bodies.
10. See the future as a picture puzzle. The future is a collection of possibilities, directions, event, twist and turns, advances, and surprises. “In a projection of the future, we have to anticipate where the pieces will go, and the better we understand the connections, the more accurate the picture will be. “Solve what is really going on in America.” “Find the parts that fit together with each other that intertwine and connect.”
11. Don’t get so far ahead of the parade that people don’t know you’re in it. “Even the most talented leaders need the parade to put an idea into practice. If we leave the parade too far behind and run ahead with our vision, we will be running empty miles.”
12. Resistance of people will not fall until changes are made and benefits are apparent. “I have visited Asia several times each year, and I have always been fascinated by the energy that the Asians, especially the Chinese, put into proceeding against all odds and dealing with any change, as long as they were sure of the benefits.” “Within China millions of the rural populations are seeking ways to get out of poverty”. “In China the eagerness for a share in the growing economic pie are driving people where the action is.”
13. Things that we expect to happen always happen more slowly. “The time span from playing with an idea to having usable product has gotten shorter over the centuries but still takes time, and mostly longer than we expect.” In 1923, 120 million people were molded by the force of radio. In 1946, Thomas Hutchinson wrote, “TV is the greatest means of communication ever developed by the mind of man. It should do more to develop friendly neighbors, and to bring understanding and peace on the earth, than on any other single material force in the world today.”
14. Exploit opportunities. A declining market for a product can’t be fixed by improvements to an already obsolete technology. The effort to do so often paralyzes the capacity to invest in the new opportunities. “The entrepreneurial mindset is all about this impulse of seeing and then doing something creative with a presented opportunity.”
15. Don’t add unless you subtract.
China: The periphery is the center
1. Deng Xiaoping said, “We in China are faced with the task of transforming our backwardness and catching up promptly with the advanced countries of the world”.
2. “The big problem is how to make China’s big state companies efficient at a rate that does not create too much unemployment at any given time.”
3. Even at the present rates of growth, it will be at least 30 or 40 years before China will catch up to America’s standard of living. China’s GDP is $2 trillion verse US $12 trillion.
4. China has 166 cities with populations off more than 1 million-compared with 12 in Japan, 9 in the US and 1 in Britain. The country’s rapid urbanization has lifted hundreds of millions of rural Chinese out of poverty.
5. Today China has more than 400 schools offering design courses that together graduate some 10,000 industrial designers a year, up form only about 1,500 in the year 2000.