Mind Set!: Eleven Ways to Change the Way You See--and Create--the Future [Paperback]

 

 

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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.

I was expecting a lot from this book but I was in for a big disappointment. I really tried hard but when an author becomes unprofessional that is the absolute limit. I never had this feeling before of wanting to throw a book literally in the bin. I have read many similar books before but this book is not professional and certainly not scientific.

The subtitle "reset your thinking and see the future" becomes therefore pretty much a joke, especially when an author starts bashing in this case on Europe without real argumentations or facts. By doing so John Naisbitt exposes himself of being very unknowledgeable or unprepared for this book. It is a worrisome observation as it makes you wonder how John Naisbitt got to his other viewpoints for this book. If you have even minimal international experience you can write better chapters yourself.

Another reviewer at amazon.com even wrote that this author talked like a teenager going for a personal revenge against someone or something. Sadly I have to agree with this reviewer. And you simple don't pay for a book to read someone's narrow mind setting, frustrations and very poor made extrapolations. John Naisbitt just tries here to ride on his past-successes.

Regarding the "mindsets" offered I have to agree fully with the reviewer James A. Hatherley from Boston (reviewer at amazon.com). He wrote an excellent and even very polite (and similar negative) review of this book.

So really, forget this book and read "The world is flat" by Thomas L. Friedman instead: more insightful, much more objective and way better researched.

John Naisbitt begins this book with a reference to the story The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint Exupery (a book I'd also recommend).

The reference Naisbitt makes to `The Little Price' is to how we don't see what is before us, only what we are able to see, and this idea echoes throughout the book.

In the first half of the book he describes eleven mindsets or ways through which we see and understand the world. The key point here is that the world doesn't exist for us to observe, it exists because we observe it, and exists only in the ways that we are able to observe it.

In describing each of the eleven mindsets Naisbitt describes the limitations of our current mindset and the opportunities of a new mindset.

Of the eleven mindsets I found the following particularly useful:-

4. Understanding how powerful it is not to have to be right
5. See the future a as picture puzzle.
9. You don't get results by solving problems but by exploiting opportunities.
11. Don't forget the ecology of technology

In the second half of the book he then takes some of these mindsets and applies them to what we are encouraged to call the `real world' and extrapolates some futures.

Here there are some interesting thoughts on our movement towards a visually centred culture, an economic shift from nation states to economic domains and some scathing perspectives on Europe. These serve as examples of what may be seen through a new mindset and the real jewel of the book is that it invites us to explore our own futures.

This is a thought provoking book, and well worth reading.

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