Mastering Megatrends: Understanding and Leveraging the Evolving New World

By Doris Naisbitt and John Naisbitt

From the authors of The New York Times bestseller, Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives, comes Mastering Megatrends: Understanding and Leveraging the Evolving New World, which deals with the complexity of change. It is one thing to spot a real trend from a fad, but it is quite another thing to deal with an incoming trend.

In today’s digital world, almost everyone can easily access information. But this information can be either fact or opinion, informative or intentional, intellectual or populist, spread by humans or algorithms. Once spread, it is consumed by readers who may be open or biased and have culturally and geographically diverse attitudes.

Since we naturally tend to ignore information that jeopardizes our own expectations, Mastering Megatrends offers guidelines on how to take down internal and external barriers of understanding as it covers such topics as:

• HOW TO MAKE JUDGMENTS AND MASTER EMOTIONS

• UNDERSTANDING THE EMERGING PLAYERS

• A NEW MAPPING OF THE WORLD

• MASTERING A NEW WORKING WORLD

• MASTERING THE EDUCATION CHALLENGE

• MASTERING MASS COMMUNICATIONS

• MASTERING A NEW TRADE ORDER

• Language: English
• Publisher: G&D Media
• Release date: Oct 14, 2019
• ISBN: 9781722523862

Doris Naisbitt

Doris Naisbitt began her visits and studies of China ten years ago, and since 2007 has been the director of the Naisbitt China Institute in Tianjin and a professor at Yunnan University. She is the former head of the Austrian publisher Signum Verlag, which she upgraded to become a major player in the German-language business book market. Doris lives in Vienna, Austria, and Tianjin, China.

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Introduction

How Thoughts Became a Book

Ever since Megatrends was published in 1982, the question we have most been asked is What is the next megatrend?

Almost everyone, including us, would like to have a map, which would help us outline our path into a predictable environment called future. And with more or less imagination and interpretation information available allows us to draft a more or less accurate picture of what will be. The impact and success of Megatrends was based on helping people to sort our things they were mostly familiar with. And in due course take the single pieces of the presence and form a picture of the future. At that time it guided readers through the transformation America would undergo in the 1980s and 1990s.

Looking back to Megatrends 1982 it is not hard to see how its insights helped people to ride the trends in the direction they were already going. The move from an industrial society to an information age, the most significant and most influential of the ten Megatrends outlined in that book, was well on its way and had already started to influence production, labor markets, communication, entertainment, and social life. The stories people tell about the impact of reading Megatrends have one thing in common: the book helped them recognize ten trends that were already unfolding. The book made clearer what they had sensed to some degree: "Megatrends helped me to put the pieces of the puzzles together."

Megatrends 1982: Good News for All

Even though Megatrends was written based on developments in the United States and for the United States, people in other parts of the world (Megatrends was published in 57 countries) could benefit. The individual trends were making their way from the West to the other parts world. Readers followed the thoughts and reviewed and updated their own thinking. Getting clarity helped students, employees, and entrepreneurs to plan their careers and business strategies.

The transformation Megatrends described was fundamental, but it was a continuation of developments that were already at work, though not obvious. In most regards it was pursuing something that was already in place, but was not a complete rethinking. In most cases the change was welcome. And most important, the driver of change was and would remain the United States. Easy to accept for any American but also easy to embrace for Asians, especially the Chinese, as their orientation for progress and learning at that time was towards the West, mainly America. Even Western Europe, which never had too humble a mindset, accepted America’s lead. Megatrends 1982 was good news for all.

In the 30 plus years since Megatrends was published, the manifestations of the described trends became more obvious and the speed of implementation accelerated. During those decades as author and co-authors, we have dealt with the developments outlined in Megatrends in greater detail. Megatrends Asia described the economic rise of Asia; High Tech High Touch elaborated on the unintended consequences of the information age; China’s Megatrends was about the pillars on which China, the challenger of the leading global role of the West, was resting and building. Global Game Change, first published in 2015 in China, dealt mostly with geopolitical change. Many of the developments had already been anticipated with more or less clarity in Megatrends.

New Megatrends Arising

The question of what the next megatrends would be remained. But trends cannot be forced to appear; most so-called trends are fads coming and going. Megatrends do not come every second year. All you can do is keep your eyes open, and that’s what we did. And slowly, as we were traveling and observing the world, something seemed to move. It started as an indefinable feeling. Something was in the air. We could not quite capture it, but we felt that it was something profound.

We started our research to get clarity on what was really changing. After a while we sensed that many of the developments had parallels with the reformation of the 15th century. The Reformation of the 15th century over time led to modernity, the rise of the West and the world order we have lived with for the last 200 years. We started a manuscript and chose Global Reformation as its working title. As we went along we understood that just as in the historic reformation it was also a time holding great opportunities. So our working title changed to The Great Opening Up. We continued our research and, as it happens when you are very deep into a subject, one day it became clear to us: This is not just describing new megatrends. What we are witnessing is the path to a complete change of the global game. Not as the transformation described in Megatrends in 1982, finding its way from the U.S. to the world, but parallel shifts involving countries on almost every continent and taking place in various fields and directions, feeding into each other, connected politically, economically, and technologically. As in the 15th century, the change we are witnessing will result in a new world order.

A New World Order

Our first approach, to compare the transformation to the 15th century reformation had pointed us in the right direction. In the 15th century, the invention of mechanical movable type led to a communication revolution and changed education from being accessible only to an elite to becoming accessible to the masses. Cities were growing and affluence among commoners rising. But most important was the beginning of the fading hegemony of the Catholic Church. In our days, the parallel to the printing press, the Internet, enables millions to connect, communicate, and influence. Individuals and businesses no longer operate independently in their field of endeavor and within limited geographic areas but are integrated parts of global developments.

Beginning with the Renaissance in Italy, enforced by the Reformation in the 16th century the political influence of the Catholic Church and its control over education and science diminished. Until then the earth was taught to be the center of the universe, just as the Pope and Rome were the center of religion. Scientists were standing up against the wisdom of thousands of years: the belief that the sun revolved around the earth. The shift from the geocentric to the heliocentric world view did not directly change the life of the average person, but it had comprehensive consequences, leading to an explosion of scientific breakthroughs opening thitherto shuttered opportunities. Nevertheless it took almost 400 more years before Darwin questioned the last domain of the Church, our divine origin.

In a parallel to the development 500 years ago, the hegemon of our days, the United States can no longer claim to be the helmsman of the global community. Its self-perception as the global authority is no longer unchallenged. Its leading position in science and technology challenged.

China, the driver and frontrunner in the parade of emerging economies, is claiming a stronger position in the global community and gaining ground not only economically, but also in scientific progress, which for a long time has been the domain of the West. The self-inflicted crisis in Western democracy, the economic stagnation, the political polarization, all fed into the overall trend of a systemic change. The appropriate title was in fact Global Game Change and it was published in China in 2015 and since then in 16 other countries.

Global Game Change was dealing with what was taking place. But it did not touch the question how to deal with it. How to deal with the complexity of change was moving into the center of our interest and finally led to writing of this book, Mastering Megatrends.

Chapter One

New World Rising: From Individual Megatrends to Systemic, Integrated Change

In our previous book Global Game Change we laid out the new global rearrangements and their participants. And yet to stop there would not fully capture the characteristics and comprehensiveness of the global transformation that is taking place now. Within the next decades the individual megatrends will lead to a systemic, integrated change, a global transformation: politically, economically, socially and procedurally. And the speed at which all of this is taking place is accelerating.

It is one thing to capture and describe the characteristics of megatrends. It is another to understand the impulses leading to systemic, integrated, and disruptive change occurring globally in all economic sectors and political systems. And it is yet another to focus on how to master and leverage such megatrends.

In many ways, enabled and accelerated by new technologies, the geopolitical matrix, the economic landscape, and our working world are transforming, making it increasingly harder to keep up and adapt to the enormous impact. In the 1980s when Megatrends was written, there was no need to rethink global economic and political power structures. The West remained dominant and even strengthened its position. But if we want to anticipate what will transform our lives in coming decades, we must be open to thinking in new arrangements in the global community and in many spheres of life.

Mastering Today’s Megatrends

As we already noted, most of the megatrends we have to master today have their roots in the 20th century, where many of the disruptive technologies had their early beginnings. The two most disruptive technologies arose in the second half of the 20th century to help drive the transition from the industrial age to the information age—computers and the Internet. And these two technologies continue to drive today’s megatrends. The two overarching megatrends are digitization and globalization; these two are interconnected, and they influence and amplify all other trends.

DIGITIZATION

Digitization (the process of converting information into a digital format) underpins the function of both computers and the Internet, enabling information in a variety of formats—text, photo, illustration, audio, video, and so on—to be converted, stored, and communicated electronically. Initially, computers and the Internet created a platform that helped to drive the transition from the industrial age to the information age by facilitating information sharing and communication. Relatively recently, this same platform grew in its use as a social venue, enabling people from around the world to communicate and share in real time. Now, it is changing the way we are educated, the way we work, the way we produce, the way we exchange and pay for goods and services, the way we consume media, the way we vote, and even the way we drive our cars or, perhaps, the way our cars will drive us.

Digitization is a key disruptive force across most industries and government organizations. A case in point is media companies that are struggling to meet the challenge of growing competition for audience attention. In the past, media consumers had a relatively small number of TV channels, radio stations, newspapers, books, magazines, and other forms of media from which to choose. Now, millions of media sources and social channels are only a click or a screen tap away. Media companies face competition not only from one another, but also from non-media companies and even individuals, who can create, record, and post a wide variety of media on numerous Internet channels in near real time. Media companies are having to adopt a multichannel approach, and some are failing to make the transition. As Horizon media analyst Grad Adgate points out, In an era of media clutter, they have really gone multichannel. A lot of companies want to do it, but it’s really difficult, because many times if you go past your core business, it can kind of implode.

However, as written in High Tech High Touch, technology tends to be counterbalanced with a human response, so as we observe tech-driven changes, we also observe an increased need among people to attend to their human side. A rise in technology leads to an increased focus on nature, health, entertainment, sports, music, art, spirituality, and other human essentials.

Unfortunately, this need to counterbalance hightech with high-touch does not always elicit a human response. In the U.S., for example, the educational system has begun to shift its focus to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses at the expense of humanities and what some consider to be less commercially valuable pursuits. While a focus on STEM is certainly important for building a high-tech workforce, one of the biggest mistakes in education systems is to cut back on subjects and activities that enhance creativity, such as art, music, and sports. After all, while many tech companies have been founded and are run by engineers, one of the most successful, Apple, is the product of the creative mind of Steve Jobs, to whom Chinese calligraphy was more inspiring than the beauty of perfect algorithms.

GLOBALIZATION

The globalization of our economies, addressed in Megatrends in 1982, has continued but the speed, interconnectedness, and interrelationships have increased, primarily due to digitization. What has changed is the direction of the driving force. While in the 1980s economic currents drifted from the west to the east, a strong drift from southern emerging economies northwards is gaining power, changing the geopolitical matrix.

The rising economic power of the Global Southern Belt has naturally led to a rise in its political influence. Understanding the mindsets of the emerging economies is key not only to the shift from a Western centric to a multi centric world, but also to the degree to which their increasing spending power can be leveraged by the business world of the West.

Understanding China, whose rise we dealt with in Megatrends Asia and China’s Megatrends not only helps to gain insights in its long-term strategic plans, but also facilitates access to its huge consumer market.

The introduction of the Internet opened the door to the creation of a new working world, which is still in its beginning stage. Now is the time to set sail to be able to leverage the potential of the new technologies.

Megatrends Highlights

As our economies are becoming more and more integrated, we will see a greater integration with an increase of city-to-city and industrial domain relations. In social economic developments, the impact of a growing global middle class on consumption and on demands in politics will be more and more perceptible. The contrasting challenges of mastering the demographics of aging populations and those of a growing young workforce streaming into the job markets will become more apparent.

In terms of economics and technology, we see the world moving towards one global integrated system. Digitization is amplifying the interconnectedness of companies and talents to develop new products and services and giving rise to new industries. Digitization in education will enable the delivery of quality education across geographical boundaries.

In geopolitics, we are moving from a Western centric to a multi centric world. We are witnessing the rise of the nations of the Global Southern Belt. New trading routes will be powered by the dynamics of the One Belt One Road Initiative. New economic alliances are feeding into the process of the shifts in economic power and political importance.

The change in the balance of power in the global community will be the most resisted megatrend. While in all other megatrends, whether it is adapting to technological advances, the consequences of increasing interconnectedness and interrelations, solving demographic challenges, fighting for reforms in education, and implementing environmental measures, nothing will touch us as strongly emotionally as the shift in power structures of the global community.

Competition and Cooperation: The Churning Role of the Players

For the past 200 years, the West was the dominating region in the world. It was the driver of economic, cultural, and technological advances. It also claimed the right to set standards in the business and in the political spheres.

One of the key pillars of the West’s claim for superiority was that economic progress is only possible by combining democracy and a market economy. It is no exaggeration that this Western formula was the success model of the past. Its culture celebrated a victorious procession into all continents with Western lifestyle, Western business practices, Western clothes, and Western food. And consider, when we talk about the West, it accounts for only 17 percent of the world’s population. But this 17 percent is holding about 75 percent of the world’s wealth. This is now coming to its end.

The transition from the Western centric to a multi centric world will not happen without bumps on the path, nor will it happen overnight. The time frame in which we will be witnesses and actors in this transformation will be the first half of this 21st century. As in any major transition, this shift will come with the need to correct and adapt to changing conditions. Europe experiences itself as the global moral authority. The United States understands itself as God’s blessed nation and has been the world’s largest economy since the 1880s. It is not willing to step aside and give China and emerging economies a free pass. Do not underestimate how dramatic this change is.

ASSERTIVENESS OR PEACEFUL RISE

There is no way to talk about the new geopolitical matrix without analyzing China’s new role in it. It is the key player in the global shift of power, which we described as the move from a Western centric to a multi centric world in Global Game Change.

When it comes to balance of power, military might very quickly comes into play. For decades, the U.S. has been the only superpower in the global community. In the past thirty years, the focus has shifted from U.S.–Russia relations to U.S.–China rivalry, all part of the long term geostrategic competition between the two countries. And China has initiated a massive push towards modernization of its People’s Liberation Army (PLO). Also, while China is still known for mass-production, its focus in economics as well as military has been on quality-production.

In June 2016, we were invited to be guests at Tiananmen Square to watch the massive military parade to commemorate the end of WWII. While we were unable to accept the invitation, the whole media world reported on the spectacular demonstration of precision and lockstep alignment, symbolically standing not only for China’s increasing military might, but also for the alignment of the masses behind their leaders. Supported by the guidance of Chinese built satellites, its 12,000 participants did not stray more than a few centimeters from their assigned spots.

Western commentators on BBC news described it as shunning creativity and innovation in favor of uniformity and obedience. China was the weakest in history when it was scourged by WWII, state run Chinese newspaper Global Times wrote in an editorial. But 70 years later it has grown into a miraculous global power.

COMPETITIVE CO-EXISTENCE

China is the driver in East Asia’s geostrategic transformation and military modernization. It is on its path to regain great-power status. Its increasing global economic power and advancing military capability support its ability to reassert its geopolitical role and influence in its three seas: the East China, South China, and Yellow Seas.

China’s assertiveness on one hand is met by its