Part 1

Every week or so Juanita and I go shopping in a town which is 28 miles south of where we live. One of the fun things we do is go a couple of second hand stores and look around. I usually browse the used books which have recently doubled in price from .25 to 50 cents for a paperback and .50 to a dollar for a hardcover. First gasoline... now used books... :-)

About a month ago I found, Megatrends, the book below. At first I passed over it... but the title kinda stuck in my mind... and "60 weeks on the New York times best seller list" indicated a lot of interest... so finally I went back and read the back cover and browsed the inside.

The author, John Naisbitt, says in the introduction, "The most reliable way to anticipate the future is by understanding the present." Naisbitt heads up a consulting firm that analyses 6000 local newspapers across the nation every month.

" Daily exposure to the ebb and flow of local action in cities and towns across the United States enables staff analysis to pinpoint, trace, and evaluate the important issues and trends."

"After a dozen years of carefully monitoring local events in this way, I have slowly developed what to me is a clear sense of the directions in which we are restructuring America."

I found his analysis of the 80's in, Megatrends, fascinating and immediately ordered the following sequels for the 90's and 2000 from Amazon. I feel these books give real insight into the spiritual transformation that is taking place in America today.

The 80's Magatrend = Information Age.

JOHN NAISBITT

" is one of the shrewdest observers of the changes sweeping America today."
— Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock and The Third Wave

" has come up with some fascinating insights. Not only as to who's in and who's out, but an unorthodox explanation for the recession, a reason the economy is in better shape than economists tell us."
— People Magazine

John Naisbitt is a social forecaster, speaker, and adviser to many of America's leading corporations. As publisher of John Naisbitt's Trend Letter, he has become the country's top authority on our nation's deeply rooted social, economic, political, and technological movements. He has counseled and advised AT&T, United Technologies, Control Data, Atlantic Richfield, KM, General Electric, and many other companies and institutions.

He is chairman of the Naisbitt Group, a Washington, D.C. based research and consulting firm. An entrepreneur since 1968, he previously had worked for IBM, Eastman Kodak, and the White House. He is a director of the GRS Group of Houston and the public director of the American Institute of Architects. http://www.naisbitt.com/

Introduction

Since the publication of Megatrends in October 1982, I noticed an important shift in the public perception. I call this change, the end of denial. For years we have denied that industrial base was eroding steadily, even though it was happening right before our eyes.

Our inability to see, however, and our penchant for denying even what we saw, were only natural, for the truth was too painful, too threatening. Because our industrial economy had served us so well for so long, its demise— was—for many of us—unthinkable.

But slowly our blind devotion to industrial America began to give way to a growing sense of the new economy. Forbes Magazine was perhaps the first bastion of conventional business thinking to break out of the old framework.

In a long, excellent essay "The Molting of America" in the November 1982 issue of Forbes by executive editor James Cook, Jim argued that the old industrial base was indeed fading away and in its place a new information-electronics economy was rising up.

Many other magazines, newspaper articles books followed and the debate ensued. Now there is growing agreement that we live in an information economy. The end of denial frees our energies to entertain the problems and opportunities of the new economy.

While America's new information economy is our important megatrend, it is only part of the puzzle.

As I have traveled around the country talking with people about the ideas in this book, the most universal (and most flattering) comment I receive goes something like this: "I knew about the things in your book, but you put them all together for me for the first time."

That is the intention of Megatrends—to discover many ways in which America is restructuring—to understand how the pieces fit together and to try to see what the new society looks like.

Each of this book's ten chapters examines one of the critical restructurings:

(1) We have shifted from an industrial society to one based on the creation and distribution information.

(2) We are moving in the dual directions of hi tech/high touch, matching each new technology with a compensatory human response.

(3) No longer do we have the luxury of operating within an isolated, self-sufficient, economic system; we now must acknowledge that we are of a global economy. We have begun to let go of the idea the United States is and must remain the world's industrial leader as we move on to other tasks.

(4) We are restructuring from a society run by short-term considerations and rewards in favor of dealing with things in much longer-term time frame!

(5) In cities and states, in small organizations and subdivisions, we have rediscovered the ability to act innovatively an to achieve results—from the bottom up. [Grass roots movements]

(6) We are shifting from institutional help to more self-reliance in all aspects of our lives.

(7) We are discovering that the framework of representative democracy has become obsolete in an era of instantaneously shared information.

(8) We are giving up our dependence on hierarchical structures in favor of informal networks. This will be especially important to the business community.

(9) More Americans are living in the South and West, leaving behind the old industrial cities of the North.

(10) From a narrow either/or society with a limited range of personal choices, we are exploding into a new free-wheeling multiple-option society.

These larger patterns are not always clear. Helped by the news media, especially television, we seem to be a society of events, just moving from one incident—sometimes, even crisis—to the next, rarely pausing (or caring) to notice the process going on underneath. Yet only by understanding the larger patterns, or restructurings, do the individual events begin to make sense.

This book focuses on the megatrends or broad outlines that will define the new society. No one can predict the shape of that new world. Attempts to describe it in detail are the stuff of science fiction and futuristic guessing games that often prove inaccurate and annoying.

The most reliable way to anticipate the future is by understanding the present.

That is the premise of this book.

For the past fifteen years, I have been working with major American corporations to try to understand what is really happening in the United States by monitoring local events and behavior, because collectively what is going on locally is what is going on in America.

Despite the conceits of New York and Washington, almost nothing starts there.

In the course of my work, I have been overwhelmingly impressed with the extent to which America is a bottom-up society, that is, where new trends and ideas begin in cities and local communities—for example, Tampa, Hartford, San Diego, Seattle, and Denver, not New York City or Washington D. C.

My colleagues and I have studied this great country reading its local newspapers. We have discovered that trends are generated from the bottom up, fads from the top down.

The findings in this book are based on an analysis of more than 2 million local articles about local events in the cities and towns of this country during a twelve-year period.

Out of such highly localized data bases, I have watched the general outlines of a new society slowly emerge.

Trends are bottom-up, fads top-down.

Content Analysis

We learn about this society through a method called content analysis, which has its roots in World War II. During that war, intelligence experts sought to find a method for obtaining the kinds of information on enemy nations that public opinion polls would have normally provided.

Under the leadership Paul Lazarsfeld and Harold Lasswell, later to become well known communication theorists, it was decided that we would do an analysis of the content of the German newspapers which we could get—although some days after publication.

The strain on Germany's people, industry, and economy began to show up in its newspapers, even though information about the country's supplies, production, transportation, food situation remained secret.

Over time, it was possible piece together what was going on in Germany and to figure out whether conditions were improving or deteriorating by carefully tracking local stories about factory openings, closings, arid production targets, about train arrivals, departures, and delays, and so on.

For example, the local papers listed names of area soldiers killed in action. We were able to get good idea of German military casualties by adding up local listings. Impressed by what we learned, we then began analyze the changing content of Japanese newspapers.

Although this method of monitoring public behavior and continues to be the choice of the intelligence community—United States annually spends millions of dollars doing newspaper content analysis in various parts of the world—it has rarely been applied commercially.

In fact, The Naisbitt Group is the first, and presently the only, organization to utilize this approach in analyzing our society. Why are we so confident that content analysis is an effective way to monitor social change?

Simply stated, because the news hole in a newspaper is a closed system. For economic reasons, the amount of space devoted to news in a newspaper does not change significantly over time. So, when something is introduced, something else or a combination of things must be omitted. You cannot add unless you subtract. It is the principle of forced choice in a closed system.

The news-reporting process is forced choice in a closed system.

In this forced-choice situation, societies add new preoccupations and forget old ones. In keeping track of the ones that are added and the ones that are given up, we are in a sense measuring the changing share of the market that competing societal concerns command.

Societies, like individuals, can handle only so many concerns at one time.

Evidently, societies are like human beings. A person can keep only so many problems and concerns in his or her head or heart at any one time. If new problems or concerns are introduced, some existing ones are given up. All of this is reflected by the collective news hole that becomes a mechanical representation of society sorting out its priorities.

Over the years, we have watched a variety of social issues emerge, gain, and then lose market share. About a dozen years ago, for example, the closed system started to fill up with new concerns about the environment.

There was extensive reaction to the Santa Barbara oil spills. Students in California buried automobiles. Earth Day was followed by Earth Day II. The amount of space devoted to the environment accelerated dramatically.

What issue—or combination of issues—was reduced in the closed system to accommodate the intrusion of environmental concerns? It was not a combination of things, but one thing. As the column inches of environmental news increased, news about civil rights decreased—on a one-to-one,
line-by­line basis.

One yielded as the other gained. By 1973 the system showed a crossover and the environmental became, for the first time, a more important preoccupation than civil rights.

During the past decade, we also witnessed a declining interest in our category Drug Use and Abuse. If all the local news space devoted to drug use and abuse during the year 1970 were equated to 100, the amount of space devoted to that subject during the year 1979 dropped to 8, although it has risen since.

During the 1960s almost all of the space devoted to what could be described as concerns about discrimination was filled with concerns about racism. Then, beginning in 1969, that space began to be shared with material about sexism, until by 1975 half of the space was filled with material about sexism and the other half with material about racism.

Starting in 1977 both subjects began to yield to concerns about ageism until two-thirds of the discrimination space was filled with material about ageism, with racism and sexism splitting the remaining one-third.

At that point, almost overnight, the Congress out­lawed mandatory retirement in the public sector and extended it from sixty-five to seventy years in the private sector. Congress acted at the crest. Concern about age discrimination has since been declining.

This process of forced choice in a closed system is a very trustworthy process for the purposes of our studies; none of the people engaged by it
(the reporters and editors) know it is occurring.

As anyone who has worked on a newspaper knows, the dominant consideration is to get the paper out on time. There is a certain amount of choice over which stories will appear in the paper, but not much.

The methodology we have developed is also free from the effects of biased reporting because it is only the event or behavior itself that we are interested in.

A sports analogy is useful here. If I read that the Chicago Cubs beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 7 to 3, I have close to 100 percent confidence that that occurred.

If I read in the box score that Steve Henderson went 2 for 5, I have a high degree of confidence that that occurred. But if the sports reporter tells me in the fourth paragraph that Steve Garvey's bone-headed play in the sixth inning blew the whole game, he is introducing a judgment call that may or may not be true.

In our work, what we are essentially doing is looking at the local box scores of the society: The zoning board changed a rule by a vote of 6 to 3; twenty people sat in at the governor's office; a transit bond issue was passed; a state referendum passed, cutting property taxes in half.

THE BELLWETHER STATES

Most of the social invention in America occurs in just five states.

Our group collects information about what's going on locally across the country and then looks for patterns. The results can be fascinating. For example, we have learned that there are five states in which most social invention occurs in this country. The other forty-five are in effect followers.

Not surprisingly, California is the key indicator state; Florida is second, although not too far behind; the other three trend-setter states are Washington, Colorado, and Connecticut.

When we trace back new trends or positions on issues eventually adopted by most of the fifty states, we find that these five states are again and again the places where new trends began. It's difficult to say why, other than to observe that all five are characterized by a rich mix of people. And the richness of the mix always results in creativity, experimentation, and change.

California, of course, is famous as a trend setter. The whole granola ethic started there: the vitamin and nutrition craze leading to the invention of the salad bar, most of the human potential groups, and the physical-fitness trend—which is not fad, by the way, but an important and enduring change in lifestyles.

Proposition 13 in California [People's Initiative to Limit Property Taxation] was really a subset of a larger trend toward citizen-initiated referenda. Now that trend has spread across the nation, with people leapfrogging the political apparatus to make quality-of-life decisions themselves at the ballot box.

Colorado initiated "sunset laws" that closed down new agencies unless legislatures explicitly renewed them. Along with Florida and California (both of which acted within a two month period in 1970), Colorado passed laws limiting growth—of population, highways, shopping centers, housing units.

That sudden occurrence in three trend-setting states encouraged us to predict a national trend. In fact, those seemingly unrelated events did mature into the important pervasive trend toward managed growth.

Connecticut, and later Washington, was the first state to elect a woman governor in her own right. With Florida, Connecticut was a leader in requiring minimum competency standards for high school graduates. This is part of accountability trend moving across the whole country; teacher standards are the next step.

Now Connecticut is setting the trend in the workplace. It passed the nation's first workers' right-to-know law, requiring manufacturers who use suspected carcinogens to identify the ingredients and give new employees information on hazardous substances they will come in contact with; New York has already followed with a similar statute.

The Connecticut Supreme Court, in a precedent-setting decision, ruled that whistle blowers can't be fired. The court said employees without a specific contract can't be dismissed for complaining about a company practice that violates state law or creates a public hazard.

Connecticut was the first to eliminate monthly minimum utility charges for poverty-level customers, and other states are now looking into it.

Washington's largest city, Seattle, was the first place in the nation to outlaw mandatory retirement laws, a trend that has since spread across the nation.

Florida, of course, started the boom in condominiums, and it is pioneering time-shared vacations, under which homes in high-priced vacation areas are purchased under divided ownership; Florida was also the first state to adopt guidelines governing time sharing. "Sunshine laws"*—requiring public agencies to hold open meetings—also began in Florida and have since spread to almost every state. *[Providing Florida’s citizens the information and records they need to hold government accountable.]

In fact, Florida is becoming increasingly important as a bellwether state and may soon surpass California. The reason is demographics. In 1980 Florida had the nation's oldest population and Floridians experienced growing tension between the site's older and younger residents.

This conflict is especially noteworthy, because by about the year 1995 the entire U.S. population will reflect the same age-youth ratio that Florida has now, according to Census Bureau projections.

By carefully watching what is happening now in Florida, we stand to learn a wealth of information about the problems and opportunities the whole nation will face in the future.

Other Developed Countries

Almost everything I have written about the United Stale Applies to one degree or another to all developed countries. Partly because of that, Megatrends has been a bestseller in every country where it has been published—including Japan.

This book has been popular in Japan because the Japanese are extraordinarily interested in the United States, and because the U.S. is a bellwether for Japan, i.e., what happens in the U. S. will probably happen later in Japan.

Japan, too, is well into process of deindustrializing, of shifting to an information-electronics economy. Japan is absorbing a tremendous amount technology in a very short time. When I was there in 1983, the Japanese showed great interest in "high tech/high touch".

I learned that the "high touch" of the traditional tea ceremony and of flower arranging were making a big comeback in Japan, surely in response to absorbing so much high tech.

After a flurry of interest in desk-top pocket calculators, the abacus is back.
That 2,400-year-old instrument with wooden beads is often used to check the accuracy of calculators, and in companies the abacus is still the primary calculating instrument. At Sumitomo Life Insurance Co., for example, 1001 cent of the employees use the old fashioned abacus, a high touch comfort in a highly technological society.

While I was in Japan, it was announced that General Motors and Fujitsu Fanuc had agreed on a joint venture to build robots in the U.S. beginning in 1984.
In my lectures, I suggested that, unless one or both sides are very foolish, we will be amazed 10 years from now at numbers of joint U.S.-Japan enterprises.

Trend Reports

Our findings are published quarterly in a national Trend Report and in regional reports. Three times each year we seminars for our clients. At the seminars we discuss emerging trends and their impact on business and on our lives.

Among our longtime clients, from whom we have learned a great deal, are United Technologies, Sears, Ogilvy & Mather, Atlantic Richfield, Edison Electric Institute, Security Pacific National Bank, General Electric, General Motors, Merrill Lynch, and AT&T.

The Trend Report staff continually monitors 6,000 local newspapers each month. Daily exposure to the ebb and flow of local action in cities and towns across the United States enables staff analysis to pinpoint, trace, and evaluate the important issues and trends.

After a dozen years of carefully monitoring local events in this way, I have slowly developed what to me is a clear sense of the directions in which we are restructuring America.

This is a book of synthesis in an age of analysis. Its purpose is to provide an overview. To do that, it is necessary to generalize, although I have tried to give many concrete examples to support my ideas and have provided the key examples that persuaded me personally to shift my world view.

Nevertheless, I risk displeasing the experts and subject specialists who can argue that to take the leap of describing the world in terms of ten shifting categories is too simplistic. In their way, they are probably right. Yet, I think it is worth the risk.

In a world where events and ideas are analyzed to the point of lifelessness, where complexity grows by quantum leaps, where the information din is so high we must shriek be heard above it, we are hungry for structure.

With a simple framework we can begin to make sense of the world. And we can change that framework as the world itself changes.

Trends, like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they are already going.

The ten megatrends discussed in this book will affect your life and your business. Trends tell you the direction country is moving in. The decisions are up to you.

But trend like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they are going. When you make a decision that is compatible with overarching trend, the trend helps you along. You may decide to buck the trend, but it is still helpful to know it is there.

This book describes the environment in which to consider the decisions of life: what to study; the right job path; where 1 live; where to invest money; whether to start a business, join a union, or run for public office.

My purpose is to offer readers a new context with which to sort out and assess today's events.

Chapter I

From an Industrial Society
to an Information Society

This book is about ten major transformations taking place right now in our society. None is more subtle, yet more explosive, I think, than this first, the megashift from an industrial to an information society.

I say this because of my experience in talking about this megatrend with people all across America. It always surprises me that so many people passionately resist the notion of an economy built on information and, despite a wealth of evidence, deny that the industrial era is over.

I think this depth of feeling represents our collective unwillingness to say good-bye to a magnificent era. I am not, of course, the first to speak about the information society. It is not a new idea. In fact, it is no longer an idea—it is a reality.
.
The problem is that our thinking, our attitudes, and consequently our decision making have not caught up with the reality of things.

Like the nine other basic shifts discussed in this book, the level of change involved is so fundamental yet so subtle that we tend not to see it, or if we see it, we dismiss it as overly simplistic, and then we ignore it.

Yet, we do so at great risk to our companies, our individual careers, our economy as a whole. It makes no sense, for instance, to re-industrialize an economy that is based not on industry but on the production and distribution of information.

Without an appreciation of the larger shifts that are restructuring our society, we act on assumptions that are out of date. Out of touch with the present, we are doomed to fail in the unfolding future.

We have to release this death-grip on the past and deal the future. We must understand this new information society and the changes it brings. We need to reconceptualize national and global objectives to fit the new economies of in formation.

We now mass-produce information the way we used to mass-produce cars.

In the information society, we have systematized the production of knowledge and amplified our brainpower. To use industrial metaphor, we now mass-produce knowledge and this knowledge is the driving force of our economy.

The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few but information in the hands of many.

Unlike other forces in the universe, however, knowledge is not subject to the law of conservation: It can be created, it can be destroyed, and most importantly it is synergetic—that is, the whole is usually greater than the sum of the parts.

Notes Peter Drucker, "The productivity of knowledge has already become the key to productivity, competitive strength, and economic achievement. Knowledge has already become the primary industry, the industry that supplies the economy the essential and central resources of production."

The five key points:

The five most important things to remember about the shift from an industrial to an information society are:

• The information society is an economic reality, not an intellectual abstraction.

• Innovations in communications and computer technology will accelerate the pace of change by collapsing the information float.[Time between sender and receiver.]

• New information technologies will at first be applied to old industrial tasks, then, gradually, give birth to new activities, processes, and products.

• In this literacy intensive society, when we need basic reading and writing skills more than ever before, our education system is turning out an increasingly inferior product.

• The technology of the new information age is not absolute. It will succeed or fail according to the principle of high tech/high touch.

Chapter II

From Forced Technology to High Tech/High Touch

High tech/high touch is a formula I use to describe the way we have responded to technology. What happens is that whenever new technology is introduced into society, there must be a counterbalancing human response—that is, high touch—or the technology is rejected. The more high tech, the more high touch.

Now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century, high tech/high touch has truly come of age. Technology and our human potential are the two great challenges and adventures facing humankind today. The great lesson we must learn from principle of high tech/high touch is a modem version of ancient Greek ideal—balance.

We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature.

Introduction

We stand at the dawn of a new era.

Before us is the most important decade in the history of civilization, a period of stunning technological innovation, unprecedented economic opportunity, surprising political reform, and great cultural rebirth. It will be a decade like none that has come before because it will culminate in the millennium, the year 2000.

For centuries that monumental, symbolic date has stood for the future and what we shall make of it. In a few short years that future will be here.

Already we have fallen under its dominion. The year 2000 is operating like a powerful magnet on humanity, reaching down into the 1990's and intensifying the decade. It is amplifying emotions, accelerating change, heightening awareness, and compelling us to reexamine ourselves, our values, and our institutions.

The purpose of this book is to identify and describe the most important trends of the 1990's. Conceived under the influence of the next millennium, these new megatrends are the gateways to the 21st century.

UNCOVERING THE MEGATRENDS FOR NEW MILLENNIUM

Megatrends do not, come and go readily. These large social, economic, political, and technological changes are slow to form, and once in place, they influence us for some time — between seven and ten years, or longer. They have the scope and feel of a decade's worth of change.

In 1982, in the book Megatrends, we described the trends that were shaping the 1980's. They were the shifts from:

1. Industrial Society to Information Society
2. Forced Technology to High Tech/High Touch
3. National Economy to World Economy
4. Short Term to Long Term
5. Centralization to Decentralization
6. Institutional Help to Self-Help
7. Representative Democracy to Participatory Democracy
8. Hierarchies to Networking
9. North to South
10. Either/Or to Multiple Option

These shifts continue pretty much on schedule. But they are now only part of the picture as we enter the 1990's and a new set of forces come into play.

The practice of dividing the world up into a list of megatrends might at first seem a little too arbitrary. Its purpose, however, is not to render life simplistic or superficial, but to establish a categorical foundation on which a greater depth of knowledge can be built.

" We are drowning in information and starved for knowledge," we wrote in Megatrends. In fewer than ten years, the growth in information has only quickened. This book presents ten new structural megatrends against which to relate the accelerating information of the 1990's.

The millennium trends of the nineties will influence the important elements of your life—your career and job decisions, your travel, business, and investment choices, your place of residence, and your children's education.

To make the most of this extraordinary decade, you must be aware of the changes that surround you. And indeed, there have never been more media—new television networks and channels, video and film, record
numbers of new magazines, newsletters, journals, and newspapers—dedicated to delivering you the changing news of the day.

But what is the news really telling you? How much information are you absorbing?

Without a structure, a frame of reference, the vast amount of data that comes your way each day will probably whiz right by you.

Events do not happen in a vacuum, but in a social, political, cultural, and economic context. This book describes for you that context. You need not agree with or accept every element of this world view.

But do use this structure as a context within which to measure the news of the day, opposing viewpoints, and new information.

The important thing is to craft your own world view, your own personal set of megatrends to guide your work, ideals, relationships, and contributions to society.

THE MILLENNIAL MEGATRENDS: GATEWAYS TO THE 21ST CENTURY

As we enter this new decade, our candidates for the most important, the overarching trends influencing our lives are:

1. The Booming Global Economy of the 1990's
2. A Renaissance in the Arts
3. The Emergence of Free-Market Socialism
4. Global Lifestyles and Cultural Nationalism
5. The Privatization of the Welfare State
6. The Rise of the Pacific Rim
7. The Decade of Women in Leadership
8. The Age of Biology
9. The Religious Revival of the New Millennium
10. The Triumph of the Individual

TOWARD THE MILLENNIUM

We cannot understand the megatrends of the 1990's without acknowledging the metaphorical and spiritual significance of the millennium.

Most important, we must recognize its power to evoke our most positive, powerful visions alongside our most terrifying nightmares. In the 1990's apocalyptic themes will emerge and reemerge with stunning regularity.

Disaster, it seems, is always just around the corner; the superpowers, having just signed a nuclear arms agreement, come face-to-face with the "greenhouse effect."

The word "millennium" comes from the Latin mille, meaning "1,000." A centennial marks a 100-year anniversary; a millennium is 1,000 years or a 1,000-year anniversary.

In 1987 the Soviet Union celebrated the millennium of the introduction of Christianity in A.D. 987 into Russia. The biblical millennium refers to the 1,000-year period after Christ's Second Coming and, after an apocalyptic battle, when the kingdom of God is established on earth.

On a secular level the millennium has come to mean a golden age in human history, a time to close the door on the past and embark upon a new era.

As we move toward this extraordinary date, the mythology of the millennium, consciously or not, is reengaging us. Some Christian fundamentalists have warned their flocks to prepare for the literal Second Coming of Christ.

On the opposite end of the religious spectrum, a wide assortment of metaphysical and occult groups, today's populist religions, are predicting the earth will undergo some sort of cataclysmic shift around the year 2000.

Headlines about global warming and holes hi the ozone layer convince many the time is at hand. There is more than one way to interpret the millennium, and as the date draws nearer, we shall encounter many.

The year 2000 is not just a new century but a religious experience related to the religious-revival megatrend.

A NEW WORLD VIEW

The 1990's present a new world view. The cold war ended in the last years of the 1980's, and the arms race has been slowed, perhaps even halted. The postwar period of nationalism and ideological cold war is over, and a new era of globalization has begun.

The arts are flourishing worldwide. There is an international call to environmentalism. Communist countries experiment with democracy and market mechanisms.

Among nations, the desire for economic cooperation is stronger than the urge for military adventure with its huge human and financial costs.

Asia has rewritten the rule book on economic development, many of its inhabitants having achieved the standard of living of Europeans.

There is a strong movement toward increasing free trade. In the poorest nations of Africa, privatization and models of self-reliance are on the ascendancy. There is a new respect for the human spirit.

This is an increasingly interconnected world. More than Megatrends, this book describes trends influencing North America, the Pacific Rim, and Europe. It is easier to do so today because the common technologies of information, service, and electronics unify these regions.

A society's occupations, what its members do for a living, color every aspect of its cultural and political institutions. So in a global economy the people of the developed world are similar to their neighbors.

We have reached for examples from around the world to illustrate the megatrends. Nevertheless, the United States is the country we know best, and that will be clear to readers.

We are often asked why our books seem so "positive" and why we do not describe more of the problems facing humankind.

Headlines about crime, drugs, the Brazilian rain forest, AIDS, chemical warfare, corruption, and double-digit deficits assault us daily, causing us to wonder whether any good can exist side by side with so much of the bad?

If the evil, ignorance, and negativity we all read about are true, how can any positive trends be valid?The people reporting the bad news are doing their job. We respect them for it.

And we admire the activists whose life's work is to right the world's wrongs.

Our mission is a different one. Because the problems of the world get so much attention, we, for the most part, point out information and circumstances that describe the world trends leading to opportunities.

On a practical level, one has to be a diehard generalist (and perhaps a bit mad) to attempt to describe the trends of an entire decade. It requires sifting through a staggering amount of information, a task made a little easier with a point of view.

Our perspective, our market niche in the vast world of information, is to highlight some of the positive, without ignoring the barriers to achieving positive results.

MILLENNIUM AS METAPHOR FOR THE FUTURE

As we approach the year 2000, the millennium is reemerging as a metaphor for the future. In the biblical millennium the establishment of a heavenly kingdom on earth could occur only after the final battle between Christ and the Antichrist, the clash of complete opposites.

Like the ancient drama, the modern millennium ignites our vision for a better world—alongside our nightmares of the world's end. The dichotomy is ever-present.

Perhaps that is why arms control cannot eliminate our fear of nuclear weapons, why declining unemployment figures, record-breaking new business starts, and new job creation fail to calm fears of a depression in the 1990's.

Beneath the specter of nuclear weapons is a growing sense of hope that if we can just "make it to the year 2000," we will have proved ourselves capable of solving our problems and living harmoniously on this fragile planet.

THE MILLENNIAL FUTURE

When we think of the 21st century, we think technology: space travel, biotechnology, robots. But the face of the future is more complex than the technology we use to envision it.

The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will occur not because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.

Today we are emerging from a 20th-century version of the Dark Ages—the combined impact of industrialization, totalitarianism, and intrusion of technology into our lives.

With most of the century behind us and the millennium ahead, we are entering a renaissance in the arts and spirituality. The magnet year 2000 is pulling forth bold experiments in market socialism, a spiritual revival, and a burst of economic growth around the Pacific Rim.

The wider our horizons and the more powerful our technology, the greater we have come to value the individual. Because of George Orwell's book 1984, that year has for decades symbolized the dehumanization of modern society.

The year 1984 has come and gone, and the importance of the individual has only increased, massively in Communist-bloc countries.

Notice how many groups set their goals with reference to the year 2000, goals for ending hunger, a drug-free society, a cure for cancer. The milestone of the millennium acts like a deadline, encouraging us to confront and resolve our problems so we can meet it with a clean slate.

Those problems we do not willingly confront, it seems, are being thrust upon us. The 1990's will force us to make choices about planetary concerns from nuclear accidents to chemical and environmental pollution.

Humanity will probably not be rescued deus ex machina* either in the form of a literal Second Coming (the fundamentalist expectation) or by friendly spaceships (the New Age version). Though we will be guided by a revived spirituality, the answers will have to come from us.

Apocalypse or Golden Age. The choice is ours. As we approach the beginning of the 3d millennium, the way we address that question will define what it means to be human.

*[Latin “god from the machine”- a person or thing that appears or is introduced into a situation suddenly and unexpectedly and provides an artificial or contrived solution to an apparently insoluble difficulty.]

Conclusion

These, then, are the ten most important new trends of the decade leading to the year 2000. On the threshold of the millennium, long the symbol of humanity's golden age, we possess the tools and the capacity to build Utopia here an now.

Yes, there are major obstacles to overcome—from the economic development of the Third World to healing the environment and finding a cure for cancer and AIDS.

To a large extent, however, the direction of today's megatrends strengthens society to confront its worst social ills throughout this great deadline decade.

The developed world's economic boom will be the foundation for higher evolution and global affluence. Wealth has not led to increased greed, as conventic cynicism would have us believe.

The hierarchy of needs theory of humanist psychologist Abraham Maslow expressed it simply and well: As basic needs, such as shelter and safety, are met, higher needs, such as those for belonging, achievement, and
self-actualization—that is, transcendence—rise in their place.

It is as valid for societies as for individuals. The satisfaction of basic needs has stimulated the search for meaning exemplified by the renaissance in the arts and the revival of spirituality.

As more countries grow prosperous, they must identify new areas for investment. Less developed countries, where labor is cheaper, become more attractive areas for profitable investment. Once the Four Tigers [Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore] achieved developed status, investment in Thailand (from Japan, the Tigers, and others) soared.

It also increased in Malaysia, while some observers argued the better-educated Philippines would have been a better target.

Now Hong Kong and Taiwan are pumping capital into China.

The Pacific Rim has rewritten the history of economic development, jumping right over the industrial period and into the information economy, where the most important resources do come not from the ground but from people.

Throughout the Third World there is a growing consensus that small enterprise, not central planning, is the road to real prosperity.

The spectacle of the Soviet Union and China reaching for market mechanisms will only accelerate the Third World's shift from a Marxist model of economic development to an entrepreneurial model sanctioned—indeed copied—by the Communist super­powers. That will invigorate the quest for economic self-sufficiency.

Prosperity and democracy are what will finally end deadly regional conflicts. As Bob Dylan put it, "When you got nothing, you got nothing to lose." Wealth is a great peacemaker.

The forty-four richest nations have been at peace for more than forty-five years. When developing countries make peace with their neighbors, a greater proportion of their resources can be invested in economic development.

The scourge of AIDS and the suffering it has wrought symbolize our ignorance of our bodies and their priceless immune systems. Yet today, as we learn more about the role of positive visualization and imaging in health, we are on the brink of being able to see into the very nature of the human cell, even the DNA code itself.

" We have just begun to use a wide array of new imaging technologies such as nuclear resonance to peer into living tissue. We have just begun to apply biophysics to the relationships inside the cell, as in DNA," writes T. George Harris, editor in chief of American Health. "We will soon be able to fight viruses and bacteria even before we identify them."

The rapprochement between the superpowers reduces the chance of a regional conflict escalating into a world war. Furthermore, the United States and the USSR have less of an incentive to inflame their client states in order to gain political or military advantage.

That creates a more fertile climate for resolving conflicts, which in turn, blunts the effectiveness of terrorism. Developing countries that succeed in preserving their cultures remain stronger and find it more difficult to justify striking out against the West.

The end of the cold war has shifted the world's attention to the environment. Though some would argue it is too little too late, never before has there been competition among heads of state for global leadership in the environment.

George Bush wants to be an "environmental" President. Mikhail Gorbachev mentioned the environment many times in his historic United Nations speech. Margaret Thatcher at times sounds like an environmentalist "Green."

The post-cold war era will see the United States and the Soviet Union collaborate on the environment and on new nonideological approaches to ending poverty.

The meaning of that great symbol the millennium depends entirely on how it is interpreted. It can mark the end of time or the beginning of the new. We believe the decision has already been made to embrace its positive side.

Within the hearts and minds of humanity, there has been a commitment to life, to the Utopian quest for peace and prosperity for all, which today we can clearly visualize. Humanity is entering a decade-long race to confront
the great challenges remaining in hope of making a fresh start in the year 2000.

The 1990's will be an extraordinary time. The count-down—1992, 1993, 1994—is just about to begin. Get ready. You possess a front-row seat to the most challenging yet most exciting decade in the history of civilization.

The New Millennium2000+
Megatrend = Spirituality and Transformation.

Patricia Aburdene

Megatrends 2010

Seven Dynamic Trends Transforming Business, Society and Our Lives

In Megatrends and Megatrends 2000, both number-one bestsellers, authors John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene predicted the shift from an industrial to an informational economy, the booming 1990s and the power of High Tech/high touch.

Today, information technology is a trillion-dollar sector.

Today's business world is undergoing massive change. As corporate scandals, the tech bubble and a mistrustful public compel business to demonstrate ethics, trust and integrity, a grassroots movement of CEOs, investors, consumers and "ordinary" managers are living the ideology of Conscious Capitalism.

Highly successful business leaders at all levels are themselves using a variety of consciousness-transforming practices and encouraging their colleagues to affirm socially responsible values at work.

As more people turn inward to embrace spirituality and values, leading-edge companies have discovered that social and environmental values enhance profit and productivity.

Once in a great while a book comes along that challenges conventional wisdom and opens the floodgates to the future. Megatrends 2010's blend of meaning, morals and bottom-line economics celebrates the demise of Business as Usual and the birth of Conscious Capitalism.
http://www.megatrends2010.com/index.cfm

Introduction

In Megatrends, published in 1982, John Naisbitt and I talked about the birth of the Information Economy.

For millennia, the West's developed economies had been based on agriculture. That was how people made their living.

Then came the Industrial Revolution. Sometime in the 1960s or 1970s, we argued, another, more subtle upheaval occurred: More and more people held jobs in which they created, processed or manipulated information.

By 1982, the Information Economy was up and running, but it was still a controversial idea. "Information?" some folks scoffed. "There can't possibly be any economic value in that." But by the 1990s, the Information Economy had blossomed into the age of high technology, now a trillion-dollar industry.

Today we are on the brink of another extraordinary revolution. The Information Age is already over and an exciting new epoch is taking its place.

Remember, the key point is this: When wealth is derived from a new source—say information rather than industry—a new economic era is born. In time, people's jobs reflect that new activity. That said, consider the following:

It is often argued that the soul of a technology-driven economy is continuous innovation. No successful enterprise can pat itself on the back for last year's software, for example, then sit around until customers demand a better product.

Corporations must lead the market by initiating change.

But the same is true whether you're a tech firm, a consumer-products company or a public relations agency: Creativity and innovation are the name of the game.

Medical tech device maker Medtronic, for example, invented pacemakers in 1957. Today, for each new product launched, the company is working on four generations of upgrades. That steady stream of innovation has translated into more than 20 percent a year in earnings growth for over a decade.

How do corporations achieve the challenging but lucrative goal of continuous innovation? The short answer, the only answer, is through the genius inherent in human consciousness.

In fact, there can be no invention in business or technology without human consciousness.

What is consciousness? I use the term in the spiritual sense, to mean presence or alertness — the awareness of awareness, the willingness to observe without attachment, the gleam of Spirit that animates humanity.

When an engineering whiz is patiently contemplating a complex problem, submerged for hours on end, he or she is living in the Now, dwelling in the realm of consciousness.

Consciousness, the prime ingredient in creativity, represents a higher intelligence than the mind. When consciousness guides our mental facilities, the result can be brilliant.

Technology is consciousness externalized.

We've reached the point in economic history where human consciousness — the capacity for quiet, detached observation — is the raw material of innovation and, ultimately, of corporate money making. We will return to that point often in these pages.

Consciousness is now as valuable to business as mundane assets like capital, energy or even technology. And the best way to cultivate consciousness is through techniques like meditation... and that's exactly what many companies are up to.

To those who claim high tech is dead and that computers have become replacement industry (like refrigerators), I would reply: One highly conscious individual can — and will — create the "killer app" (a software application that's so popular and universal, like word processing or email, that it drives hardware sales) that will launch a $100 billion industry.
Welcome to the New Economy of Consciousness.

Charting the "Inner" Dimensions of Change

Megatrends 2010 chronicles the social, economic and spiritual trends transforming capitalism into a new, more wholistic version of itself.

What is a megatrend? It is a large, overarching direction that shapes our lives for a decade or more.

The inner world of ideals and belief shapes our actions.

Let me tell you what I mean. The search for morals and meaning at work, as well as the desire to experience the peace and purpose of the Sacred in the stressful world of business, are "inner" truths, alive in the hearts of millions of people.

These internal realities profoundly influence people's behavior—like the choice to invest in a corporation that embraces higher social, environmental and ethical standards than its peers; the decision to work only for a company that honors your soulful, creative instincts; or the pledge to shop only at retailers who refuse to traffic in "sweatshop" labor.

These inner truths are our values—and they play a crucial role in change.

How does transformation happen? In Re-inventing the Corporation, John Naisbitt and I suggested a formula that I think is especially useful today. Social transformation, we wrote, "occurs only when there is a confluence of changing values and economic necessity."

Turbulent Times

Business has yet to recover from the jolting events of recent history: recession, the market crash and corporate accounting scandals. Yet we now face new challenges—growing deficits, soaring energy and healthcare costs,
the prospect of rising interest rates and shrinking disposable income, and a "recovery" in which corporate spending and hiring remain sluggish.

As individuals, too, we live in a time of great uncertainty—the constant threat of terrorism, two recent wars, unemployment, fractured IRAs and lost savings. When we find little security outside ourselves, we are forced to look within to search the heart and soul for fresh answers and new directions.

That is why, "The Power of Spirituality," is arguably the greatest megatrend of our era.

Whether you call yourself spiritual or evangelical, green or new age, a die-hard capitalist or a soccer mom who shops with her values, you need to know the powerful trends that are already re-inventing free enterprise.

Megatrends 2010: The New List

Here is my new list of megatrends, each of which serves as one of this book's chapters.

1. The Power of Spirituality. In turbulent times, we look within; 78 per­cent seek more Spirit. Meditation and yoga soar. Divine Presence spills into business. "Spiritual" CEOs as well as senior executives from Redken and Hewlett-Packard (HP) transform their companies.

2. The Dawn of Conscious Capitalism. Top companies and leading CEOs are re-inventing free enterprise to honor stakeholders and shareholders. Will it make the world a better place? Yes. Will it earn more money? That's the surprising part: Study after study shows the corporate good guys rack up great profits.

3. Leading from the Middle. The charismatic, overpaid CEO is fading fast. Experts now say "ordinary" managers, like HP's Barbara Waugh, forge lasting change. How do they do it? Values, influence, moral authority.

4. Spirituality in Business is springing up all over. Half speak of faith at work. Eileen Fisher, Medtronic win "Spirit at Work" awards. Ford, Intel and other firms sponsor employee-based religious networks. Each month San Francisco's Chamber of Commerce sponsors a "spiritual" brown bag lunch.

5. The value driven consumer. Conscious Consumers, who've fled the mass market, are a multi-billion-dollar "niche." Whether buying hybrid cars, green building supplies or organic food, they vote with their values. So, brands that embody positive values will attract them.

6. The Wave of Conscious Solutions. Coming to a firm near you: Vision Quest. Meditation. Forgiveness Training. HeartMath. They sound touchy-feely, but conscious business pioneers are tracking results that will blow your socks off.

7. The Social Responsible Investment Boom. Today's stock portfolios are green in more ways than one. Where should you invest? This chapter charts the "social" investment trend and helps you weigh your options.

In this book's conclusion, The Spiritual Transformation of Capitalism, we explore the underlying values of capitalism. I shall attempt to dispel what I believe is the absurd notion that free enterprise is rooted in greed. Conscious Capitalism isn't altruism, either; it relies instead on the wisdom of enlightened self-interest.

Spirituality or Religion

I use the word Spirit often, so let me define It before we continue. Spirit, for me, is the attribute of God that dwells in humanity, the Great I AM, the Life Force, the aspect of us that most mirrors the Divine.

In a theological sense, you might say Spirit is analogous to the Holy Spirit, but in an ecumenical and nondenominational way. That brings up another distinction: the difference between spirituality and religion.

I use the term religion to refer to the formal, and often public, structure through which people worship God. Spirituality is the experience of, or the desire to experience the Divine.

Religion tends to be behavioral; spirituality, more experiential. Spirituality is often (but not always) a private matter. Some people, of course, are both spiritual and religious.

Money and Morals

Megatrends 2010 explores the quest for morals and meaning in business within the legal confines of modern capitalism, a world where public firms are bound by law to maximize shareholder return.

What is both remarkable and largely unheralded, however, is that corporate morality often correlates with superior financial performance.

In other words, plenty of corporate "good guys" are trouncing the Standard & Poors (S&P) 500! For example, the Winslow Green Growth Fund, which holds stock in innovative firms with high environmental standards, soared more than 90percent in 2003 (versus 28.2 percent for the top firms in the S&P 500).

Study after study by prestigious outfits—shows us that corporate responsibility, far from being a drain on profit, is an important marker of success.

The long-standing business myth of "lean and mean" threatens not just the morals but the prosperity of American business. I am not saying corporate responsibility causes financial success. But there is certainly a relationship.

It is a simple one: Socially responsible corporations tend to be well managed, and great management is the best way to predict superior financial performance.

In fact, if you want to invest in or work for a company that demonstrates high moral standards, it is relatively easy to identify many that also deliver excellent financial results.

There are thousands of great companies, but let's start with 100. The "100 Best Corporate Citizens," published annually in Marjorie Kelly's quarterly report, Business Ethics, are companies devoted to ethics, Earth and employees—yet, as one study discovered, they outperformed the S&P 500 by a stunning 10 percentile points.

Then again, suppose you're a Conscious Consumer; you vote with your pocketbook—whether for fair trade coffee, solar panels or that new Honda Accord hybrid. Well, you're not alone.

Most Americans weigh the moral impact of their purchases. An impressive 79 percent consider corporate citizenship in deciding whether to buy a product, says a Hill & Knowlton/Harris Poll, while 36 percent call it an important factor in a purchase decision.

That 36 percent are your fellow Conscious Consumers.

In Megatrends 2010, you'll see why Conscious Consumers are a $250-billion dollar market that's changing free enterprise for the better.

Success and Consciousness: The Missing Link

" Spirituality" in business sounds lofty. How practical is it?

The answer is "very." There's a fundamental way in which Spirit and consciousness contribute to worldly success—and it has long been ignored.

As experts, authors and gurus often note, the game of business is to influence the external world. But here's the point: How can you control your environment if you can't even manage your own thoughts and emotions?

In other words, how do you rule the world without first mastering yourself?
The cornerstone of effective leadership is self-mastery.

But that's exactly what's missing in business today. Lack of self-mastery is why so many business heroes wind up in court—if not the jailhouse.

The fallen heroes of free enterprise who parade across our TV screens illustrate the irrational, self-destructive choices we make without the grounding, illuminating power of self-mastery.

And the surest route to self-mastery is spiritual practice. Time spent in peaceful reflection or mindful meditation clarifies thought, sharpens intuition and curbs unhealthy instincts. Spirituality, it turns out, is a lot more practical than most of us ever thought.

Am I saying a dedicated meditation practice would have helped people like former Tyco CEO Dennis Koslowski*, former AIG chairman Hank Greenburg and many others? Yes. I certainly am.

*[Dennis Kozlowski, was sentenced up to 25 years in prison for stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from his company.]

Worldly power without self-mastery is the downfall of leadership.

Why Now?

Meaning, morals and self-mastery are what's missing in business, all right. But the legal limits of capitalism warn us that high-minded ideals are no substitute for success. Business is obliged to turn a profit.

Besides, without cash flow and profit, how does a company hire people, attract shareholders, pay suppliers or invest in R&D? In the midst of recession, corporations executed harsh measures to restore profit. But today, the layoffs are behind us. Hiring is finally picking up.

Profits are back, mostly because of cost-cutting. Now business must again start to focus on growth. How do you grow a business? With people. You need a strategic plan, of course, but what good is that without the right people to execute it?

People alone drive peak performance.

Studies like McKinsey's much-quoted "War for Talent" show the best people are attracted to companies that fulfill the deep, personal need for meaning while making contributions to society—beyond the profit motive.

That's exactly what the companies cited in Megatrends 2010 do. Moreover, this is the ideal point in the business cycle to invoke the power of consciousness, values and Spirit.

The seeds of corporate transformation grow best when a high performance culture is already in place, says Michael Rennie. In high performance cultures, meaning and morality deliver the elixir of superior productivity, but, says Rennie,

" You actually have to create a performance ethic first."

At this point in the business cycle, corporations have achieved that goal. The next step is to recognize the power of their human assets—people who are full of wisdom, consciousness and Spirit.

The time is now and the task at hand is the moral transformation of capitalism—while growing prosperity.

This book's message is simple and clear: 1. (we the people have the power to heal capitalism;) 2.( capitalism has the power to change the world.)

Isn't it time we got started?

The Power of Spirituality
From Personal to Organizational

As Hewlett-Packard's VP and general manager of inkjet cartridge operations, Greg Merten managed 10,000 people and a multi-billion-dollar business. Much of his success, he says, grew out of the transformation he experienced when his son Scott, 16, was killed in an automobile accident.

He calls Scott's loss "my greatest tragedy and greatest blessing."
Scott was a "real people person," who never had an unkind word for anyone, says Merten. Scott's example inspired Merten to focus on and invest in his relationships including business.

"I used the tragedy as a source of learning, an occasion to see," he says.
Specifically, every four to six weeks Merten carved out a full day to meet with his eight senior managers and with coaches Amba Gale and Mickey Connelly.

"We'd update Amba and Mickey on what had happened since we last met, then together ask, 'So, okay, what are we going to do about it?' We explored how to behave differently, find more productive choices, expand our influence and make a bigger difference.

" It was the most concentrated learning environment I've ever known," says Merten, "because it focused on 'the conversation,' that is, how people operate, with each other. In the face of differences, do we inquire"? Do we try to understand each other and create value? Or do we need to be right and then defend, disagree, destroy—and waste the chance to generate positive results?"

Armed with these conscious techniques, Merten led his group through several business doublings in a year and expanded operations from one to six sites.

As Merten's spiritual insight blossomed, he learned to "Let go, forgive and suspend judgment," then applied these powerful truths at HP. "I quit competing and starting to think of the other person first." He "granted others 'good intentions' even in the face of contradictory evidence."

How do spiritual principles like these impact corporate success? Put simply, Merten's enlightened business precepts changed how things got done internally and externally.

They inspired people to trust themselves and others. As Merten's team grew in awareness and consciousness, they "gained access" to actions and options that were literally unavailable to them before.

Merten says these breakthroughs, in his words, "contributed hundreds of millions in incremental dollars to HP's bottom line."

How so? Merten offers this answer.

" We put up our third site [after Singapore and Puerto Rico] near Dublin twice as fast as it had ever been done in HP history. The Irish contractors literally laughed at us when we told them our due date. How did we do it?

Mickey Connelly helped us take the Irish contractors, the developers, the County Kildare officials and HP's own operations folks through the same protocols on relationship and conversation that we ourselves practice."

The Dublin success alone, says Merten, "netted HP hundreds of millions. We needed the capacity that much."

'You can create results from fear," Merten admits, "but I came to see that the greatest results come from a more positive place—community, relationship and conversation."

Greg Merten retired from HP in 2003 and now consults on something he understands well: the art of outstanding leadership.

Let's start with a simple assertion: business is transforming because people like Greg Merten and other top executives—as well as millions of "ordinary" managers, work in corporations! As individuals grow in consciousness and Spirit, so do the organizations they inhabit.

The problem is organizations take longer to change than people do. Why is institutional change more difficult? Because it is so complex. Not only does it require time, vision and leadership, it involves greater numbers of people, their commitment and the development of a shared purpose. Institutional transformation relies on human evolution, grows slowly, then finally hits the mark.

In the years that it takes for all these positive ingredients and uplifting circumstances to catalyze, the people inside companies can grow so discouraged, they fall victim to the lie that "business as usual" would have us believe: the idea that there's an impenetrable barrier between personal spirituality and corporate transformation, between Spirit and business.

The purpose of this first chapter is to dissolve that firewall.

Meeting the Enemy

Meanwhile, the quest for spirituality flourishes in society at large. I'll soon cite plenty of figures to illustrate that point. Yet many people, even those who are spiritually aware, envision the business establishment as an armed fortress that will somehow repel the transformation everyone else is going through.

That is not going to happen. Because business does not possess the power to prevent people from transforming. Yet there's little wonder why we think it does!

The business world often portrayed on CNBC and in The Wall Street Journal boasts, not just a single-minded passion for turning a buck, but unmatched devotion to assassinating any high-minded ideal that might get in the way.

Well, guess what? Mainstream business is under siege, from activists and regulators, as expected, but even from investors. And all the barricades in the world cannot defend it. Because the most dangerous adversary of all—a transformed individual—lies within and we are IT.

Whether spiritual CEO, activist middle manager or visionary entrepreneur, we've opened our minds and expanded our hearts and there is no shutting either of them down. So much so that as I edit this chapter in early 2005, both CNBC and The Wall Street Journal have just run stories on spirituality or faith in business.

Conscious individuals transform organizations. Period. Consider:

• The Fortune 500 CEO and devoted meditator who championed a corporate meditation room that thrives long after his retirement.

• The glamorous female executive whose lifelong spiritual quest leads her to a workshop on HeartMath that she later shares with her customers.

• The third generation CEO of a high-profile public company who disdains "selfish" capitalism and enthusiastically embraces corporate responsibility.

The Passion for Personal Spirituality

The quest for spirituality is the greatest megatrend of our era.

Before diving into some illustrative facts and figures, I should like to raise the larger, more substantive question: What does it mean to be "spiritual"? Or to want more Spirit in your life?

Admittedly, it isn't easy to define: Spirit is intangible, after all. Few of us will agree on the exact definition of spirituality. But it begins, of course, with the desire to connect with God, the Divine, the Transcendent.

That said, let me throw out the five hallmarks that I think cover most of the spiritual bases: (1) Meaning or Purpose, (2) Compassion, (3) Consciousness, (4) Service and (5) Well Being.

Many of the things we might call spiritual—inner peace, meditation, wellness, prayer, loving relationships, life purpose, mission, giving to others—fall under one of .these headings.

I may have missed one of your favorites, but I think you'll agree that all these words have one thing in common: Each and every one of them is sourced in and emphasizes the immaterial.

We may live out our spiritual inclinations here in the material world, experiencing compassion for a friend—or well being in our bodies—but the source of our inspiration is the invisible realm of Spirit.

The earthly treasures we all love and enjoy here in the mundane grid of reality—money, hot jobs, gorgeous clothes, a wonderful mate, an Ivy League diploma and a beautiful home—are missing from the "spiritual" list.

Spirituality means you thirst for something else. For the peace, wholeness and fulfillment that, as Grandma would say, "money can't buy." Perhaps you
seek also to know the Source from which all else, both material and intangible, flows. Well, you've got a lot of company.

Spirituality Is "Off the Charts"

Millions have invited Spirit into their lives, through personal growth, religion, meditation, prayer or yoga. The result is a values shift that is measurable and monumental.

A 2004 Gallup survey found 90 percent of Americans believe in God; it jumps to 95 percent when people are asked, "or a universal Spirit." Western Europeans, by contrast, have a belief rate of 50 percent.

Sixty percent of Americans say they have absolute trust in God.

But wait a minute. Haven't Americans always been a religious lot? Maybe so, but in the past decade, the number who call themselves "spiritual" is decisively higher.

In 1994, the Gallup people asked Americans whether they felt the need to experience spiritual growth. Only 20 percent said "yes." In 1999, they asked again—and a surprising 78 percent answered in the affirmative. An astounding 58 percentage point gain in five years.

But that was only in 1999. Remember how simple and secure our lives were then? Before terrorism, the market crash, war and corporate scandals. People tend to turn to Spirit in times of stress, trouble and sorrow.

In 1999 technology was still riding high; unemployment was low and no one was overly troubled by Enron, Osama or Saddam. Since September 11, 2001, however, 57 percent say they think more about their spiritual lives, reports a Time/CNN/Harris Interactive poll.

It is hardly a stretch to conclude that war, recession, layoffs and financial losses since 2001 have strengthened the ranks of spiritual seekers.

Spirit in Action

The quest for spirituality is shapeshifting human activities, priorities, leisure pursuits and spending patterns.

Some 16.5 million people practice yoga in the United States, said Lynn Lehmkuhl, an editor at Yoga Journal in 2005, up 43 percent since 2002. Ten million American adults say they meditate, twice as many as a decade ago, declares the 2003 Time cover story, "Meditation."

• Meditation, the Time article reports, is taught in "schools, hospitals, law firms, government buildings, corporate offices and prisons."

• In 1998, Colorado's Shambhala Mountain Center, which hosts yoga and meditation programs, welcomed 1,342 visitors. By 2003, it was 15,000.

• New York's Catskills hotels "are turning into meditation retreats so quickly that the Borscht Belt is being renamed the Buddhist Belt," quips Time writer Joel Stein.

Do some people do yoga and T'ai Chi or meditate as a form of stress release or exercise? Undoubtedly, but these ancient practices grow out of such profoundly spiritual traditions that I would venture to say that practitioners are connecting to Spirit whether or not they consciously seek to do so.

Spirit in Print

Spirituality has certainly inspired a megatrend in publishing.

Over a five-year period, spiritual and religious books outpaced sales in all other categories, surging from $1.69 billion to $2.24 billion, says the Book Industry Study Group.

Bestsellers like Conversations with God (Neale Donald Walsch, Hampton Roads, vols. 1-3, 1995-1998) and The Power of Now (Eckhart Tolle, New World Library, 1999) attest to our healthy appetite for soulful matters. By 2005, The Purpose-Driven Life (Zondervan, 2002) by Rick Warren had sold a robust 22 million copies.

Baby boomers, concerned with ethics and their own morality, says Publishers Weekly editor Lynn Garrett, are driving up sales in the spirituality and religion categories.

Books like Jesus CEO (Hyperion, 1996) and The Seven Seven Habits of Highly Effective People (Fireside/Simon & Schuster, 1990), which advises people to cultivate spirituality, illustrate how much Spirit has already penetrated the business category.

" All kinds of answers to the question, 'What is the meaning of my life?' are selling," says Susan Petersen Kennedy, president of Penguin Putnam Inc.

The Future of Spirituality

Spirituality is today's greatest megatrend, but where is it taking us? What's the future of our compelling interest in all things spiritual? To discover the answer, we must first clear up a common misunderstanding about the spiritual path.

Most of us harbor the belief—reinforced in the media—that a passion for the "inner life" takes us away from the world, rendering us self-obsessed, if not downright selfish.

Well, the truth is: It does. But only at first. During the journey's initial introspective chapter, many instinctively withdraw from the daily grind of modern life. Why?

Because, seekers grow more sensitive and too much stress will overwhelm the fresh, emerging spiritual consciousness.

Often we detach in order to heal: As we fill with Spirit, we release a lot of old emotional baggage, find peace, discover a new inner voice—and that requires a fair amount of energy.

When my own lifelong spiritual journey intensified in 1994, I shut off the TV for two years and rarely read newspapers. Goodbye violence, cynicism, TV commercials. Hello silence, meditation and hearing myself think.

But later the spiral path of Spirit takes a different turn and we plunge into an exciting new phase: our return to the world. Now regenerated, we come back to society and service. That is exactly what millions of people— investors, consumers, managers—and the business leaders you'll meet in this chapter are up to—living their spirituality day to day.

From Silence to Service

The miracle of spiritual healing strengthens and energizes us. Millions of people, long-time meditators, for example, (and people who are . . .
ahem . . . age 45 or older) may have spent a decade or more healing negative patterns.

They—or should I say we?—have soaked up so much spiritual energy that we are transformed. Sure, we will still face plenty of new challenges, but for this life, we're basically cooked: We will not go back to "life before Spirit."

We are chock full of Spirit and consciousness. We've hit critical mass. Now what would the Divine do with all that consciousness?

Put it to work!

In a project, cause, mission or place—somewhere in the world that attracts our now-higher consciousness. The power of Spirit embodied in people like you and me is pouring out into organizations—including businesses.

Spiritual transformation, triggered at the individual level, is now spilling over from the personal to the institutional.

Before we discover why the transformation of business is at hand, let's briefly explore the discipline of medicine, an important bellwether for business, and a field where spirituality is already revamping many established protocols.

From Medicine to Business

If a wise and advanced being were to gaze upon the drama of human evolution, she[/he] might say, "Well, they're finally starting to get it."

Humanity at long last is beginning to see that Spirit activates every part of life—politics, economics, medicine, psychology, business. Some day soon, they may even quit relegating God to the narrow confines of religion and metaphysics.

So when we talk about transformation, it's not a shift from the profane to the sacred. What is transforming is our awareness. We are waking up and smelling the roses—that is, the presence of Spirit all around us—and the scent is both comforting and intoxicating.

Most of all it is a relief to emerge from the fog of separation, where God was God, physics was physics, business was business, and medicine was medicine.

Free from the illusion of separation, we're excited about "new" disciplines like God and physics, spiritual healing, and Spirit in business.

We are awakening to the Truth that always was.

Consider the example of medicine, a near-perfect indicator for "what is coming next" to business. More than most other fields of endeavor, medicine is investigating and integrating the Truth of Spirit into daily practice.

During medicine's dramatic metamorphosis, a handful of pioneers spoke their sometimes controversial truth, opened people's minds, touched and healed them and finally revolutionized the institution of medicine itself.

Bernie Siegel, M.D., told us no physician can inform a patient how long he or she has to live. That's between you and God, he declared.

Carolyn Myss, Ph.D., opened our eyes to the bonds linking Spirit, our physical bodies and the seven spiritual energy centers called the chakras.

Larry Dossey, M.D., witnessed the healing power of prayer so often, he decided denying prayer to his patients was like withholding a needed medicine.

Jon Kabat-Zinn, Ph.D., and Herbert Bensen, M.D., demonstrated how meditation lowers blood pressure and promotes well being.

Chrisiiane Northrup, M.D., underscored the value of spiritual practice at every stage of a woman's life: maiden, mother or wise woman.

As practitioners like these legitimized new ways to perceive Spirit and medicine, half of U.S. adults have opted out of the mainstream health system—at least in part—to explore greater well being and innovative solutions through alternative care, reports a 2002 Newsweek cover story.

Americans now make more visits to alternative healers such as massage therapists, chiropractors or naturopaths than to traditional M.D.s.

Furthermore, since precious little of this "alternative" care is covered by
health insurance, we spend $30 billion of our own funds to partake of these new[?]remedies.

Follow the money, as they say. Is it any wonder that teaching hospitals and universities—from Duke and Johns Hopkins to Harvard—are setting up centers of complementary and integrative (i.e., alternative) medicine?

In chapter six, "The Wave of Conscious Solutions," we'll look at the breakthrough medical research that documents the extraordinary power of prayer in healing—and investigate how other spiritual practices might work in business.

When personal healing, with all of its psychological, spiritual, emotional and physical components, reaches critical mass, people often experience a new or renewed sense of mission or purpose. It is all about critical mass, or as one writer puts it: the "Tipping Point."

Critical Mass and the Tipping Point

I wrote about critical mass in Megatrends for Women (Villard, 1992) as a sort of counterpoint to Susan Faludi's popular (but to my mind, pessimistic) Backlash (Crown, 1991). The more progress women enjoyed, Faludi argued, the more they suffered a sort of retaliation from society. But I didn't buy it.

To my mind women's social progress from politics to business, religion to sports, had achieved such momentum that success was irreversible. Sure, there'd be setbacks along the way—Faludi is right about that—but no turning back.

Now Malcolm Gladwell's bestseller The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Little Brown, 2000) treats the notion of critical mass at book length, and I think he explains it expertly. The "Tipping Point," says Gladwell, is from the world of epidemiology.

It's the name given to the moment, in an epidemic when a virus reaches critical mass. It's the boiling point. It's the moment on the graph when the line starts to shoot straight upwards.

Sometime hi the 1990s, personal spirituality hit the Tipping Point. Now in the 00 decade, we are translating spirituality into organizations and the collective.

Gladwell, who covered the AIDS epidemic for The Washington Post before landing at The New Yorker, doesn't stick to epidemiology, though. "What if everything has a Tipping Point?" he asks. "Wouldn't it be cool to try and look
for the Tipping Points in business, or in social policy, or in advertising, or any number of other nonmedical arenas?"

Indeed—and it applies to spirituality, too. For many of us, at some point in the spiritual journey, the Divine energy within us reaches a sort of Tipp Point and a once personal quest becomes more universal:

The wounded become healers. The warriors, statesmen. The victim advocates. And the managers—corporate activists and change agents.

The Tipping Point and Social Change

The Tipping Point, says Gladwell, explains why social change so often comes "quickly and unexpectedly." It occurs this way because, he continues "ideas and behavior and messages . . . behave just like outbreaks of infectious diseases."

Invisible one moment, widespread the next.

So building on Gladwell's model, a social epidemic—or a roaring new megatrend—might simmer along, just out of official view, until one day it's ready to explode.

That is the case with the Rise of Conscious Capitalism which grows out of the lives of millions of transformed individuals. If it is not quite visible to many people, that's because, like every megatrend I've ever studied, it's a bottom-up phenomenon.

Just remember the formula from this book's introduction: When changing values meet economic necessity, transformation takes off.

Later in this chapter, you'll meet Paul Ray, co-author of The Cultural Creatives (Harmony, 2000). Ray laments how the media ignores "fundamental change going on just beneath the surface of events in American life, ready to break through in a new level of awareness and concern."

Both Gladwell and Ray explain how maverick notions gradually gain mass arid momentum, then suddenly burst onto the scene.

In the 1980s and 1990s, pioneering investors restricted their portfolios to socially responsible funds that limit holdings to stocks that can meet certain social, environmental and governance criteria.

A trend largely discounted on Wall Street, until a perfect storm of events—the tech bubble, market crashes, accounting and corporate governance scandals—ravaged main-stream business, provoking reforms, such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, which requires greater financial disclosure, audit or independence, executive accountability and a public accounting oversight board.

As you will see in chapter seven, socially responsible investing has soared 5,000 percent in less ± an two decades, according to the Washington, D.C.-based Social Investment Forum, a nonprofit association of more than 500 financial professionals and institutions and is shifting from trend to emerging megatrend.

Conclusion

The Spiritual Transformation of Capitalism

From Greed to Enlightened Self-Interest

The doctrine of Conscious Capitalism holds that business bears moral and ethical responsibilities beyond short-term profit and maximum share­holder return.

Equally important, it lifts the frequency of free enterprise from self-interest to the higher octave of enlightened self-interest.

Enlightened self-interest is not altruism. It is self-interest with a wider view. It asks: If I act in my own self-interest and keep doing so, what are the ramifications of my choices? Which acts—that may look fine right now—will come around and injure me and others one year from now? Ten years? Twenty-five years?

The spiritual transformation of capitalism is the shift:

• from greed to enlightened self-interest,

• from elitism to economic democracy,

• from the fundamentalist doctrine of "profit at any cost" to the conscious ideology that espouses both money and morals.

The metamorphosis of capitalism won't come about through the efforts of well-meaning regulators. It is being forged right now in the hearts of investors, consumers, executives—and of course "ordinary" managers. And it is to you that I address the final words of Megatrends 2010.

The Power Is in Our Hands

I have organized the chapters of Megatrends 2010 to set forth the case, by introducing one theme after another, that the future of capitalism lies not in the hands of Big Business, but in our own.

We have the power to transform capitalism.

Who again are we?

We are "ordinary" managers, visionary entrepreneurs, socially responsible investors, spiritual CEOs, shareholder activists, corporate meditation teachers, executive coaches, transformation-based consultants, corporate activists, Cultural Creatives, Conscious Consumers, business chaplains, yoga instructors, inspiring team leaders, conscious executives, fire-walking sales­women, forgiveness-trained brokers, heart-full HR honchos . . .
I could go on and on.

But my point is this: There are an awful lot of us. Many more than we, in isolation, can recognize or count. Seventy million of us are transforming capitalism, one conscious action at a time.

Fast Company's John Byrne believes we the people can, as he puts it, "enforce a market discipline" in favor of human values. "So many people today seek purpose and meaning in business that we potentially have the power to make values more important than—or at least as important as—shareholder value," he adds.

As consumers, he says, we can buy products only from companies and retailers whose values reflect our own. As employees, we can work only for companies that value their people and customers as much as their shareholders.

As shareholders, I would add, we can invest only in companies that we deem socially responsible. Byrne's words, which I heard at the Wisdom Business Network's online conference in February 2004 inspired me to create a litany of the ways we can transform business. The list that follows also recaps the main ideas of Megatrends 2010.

How to Transform Capitalism

Melt the fire wall between personal and organizational Spirit. Like Greg Merten, Ann Mincey and Marc Benioff, practice your values in business and observe how your actions influence others.

Invest in socially responsible companies—and reap a healthy, heart-centered return, while at the same time withholding your money from corporate bad guys.

Lobby your company pension fund to add or expand the SRI [Socially Responsible Investment] choices. Take your values shopping. Boycott sweatshop labor and buy fair trade coffee—even if it costs more. Get your grocer to stock the fair trade beans. Ditto for fair trade chocolate. Order
Co-op America's 2005 National Green Pages.

Become a shareholder activist. Vote your proxies. Get your mutual fund to disclose their proxy votes. Lobby fund managers to take more thoughtful positions.

Get informed about the issues and support the consumer campaign that excites you most. Log on to the Co-op America website listed in this book's appendix.

Lead your colleagues with what Ron Heifetz calls "Informal Authority."

Embody your values as a manager like a "Tempered Radical."

Read Barbara Waugh's The Soul in the Computer and create a brown bag book club to discuss Barb's principles and adventures and figure out which of them might work in your organization.

Convene Sacred Space within company walls at a yoga class or brown bag meditation. Get an empty office declared the official "quiet room." Host Sacred Space Outside the office, at a private home, cafe or business organization like the local Chamber of Commerce.

Find your soul mates at the nearest chapter of the Association for Spirit at Work. None close enough? Create your own.

Import the tools, techniques and teachings of Spirit into your company. Don't know where to start? Begin each meeting with a moment of silence. Move up to a five-minute morning meditation. Don't forget to monitor the improvements in productivity.

Honor coworkers with a meaningful ritual.

Identify the values of your company, division or department. Speak up and ask, "Are we living these or not?"

Tell other capitalists you stand for enlightened self-interest, not greed.

Throughout the pages of Megatrends 2010, I've addressed your head as well as your heart and soul. Now here we are at the end of the story and I find I want to touch your heart most of all.

The message I leave you with is an old and venerable one: "Be the change you want to happen." To this wisdom, I would add one more thought: "Allow yourself to hope."

But that triggers another voice, the cry of doubt.
Business hasn 't changed before. Why would it now ?
It seems that I am back talking to all of you, heart, soul—and mind. So here goes.

We are all suffering the same collective heartbreak over the failure of institutional transformation. Personal change—okay. Organizational? Never.

Acknowledge the feelings of hopelessness and the pattern of inertia.
But open yourself to take in the truth: Times are changing. The "game" of business is over.

What Spirit allowed in the name of free will—the greed and fraud on the shady side of capitalism—is out in the open now. We've seen it, endured the consequences and made our collective choice. We don't want it because the cost is too high. It is not who we are.

Even so, doubt lingers.
Why should I believe it this time?
Okay, so don't believe it. Just Do It.

Why? Because you've lived the dream of transformation for so long that it won't let you go. Give in to hope. Choose to co-create with a Higher Power the spiritual blueprint of business. You will make a difference. Spirit guarantees it. The only question is whether you'll perceive that difference. So much goes unseen.

So do it anyway.
What is at stake?
Your job? Not if you're a quiet leader or a tempered radical.

Your belief systems about corporate inertia? Definitely.
Prosperity? The future of capitalism? Yes and yes.

If you're tempted to say, it's been a while since my last tete-a-tete with the CEO, I take your point. But remember, distance from mundane power is not the same as the lack of power.

Yours is a different kind of power... Spiritual power.

Your job is to flood the system with the medicine of spiritual values and fresh, clear consciousness. And that is completely within your power.

It is said, in spiritual circles, if you want to change the world, you must first change yourself. Well, most of you already have. 'You've learned to listen to the silence, hear the inner voice, speak from your heart, trust something greater than yourself.

You've walked the path for years, a decade or even longer.

Maybe you're not the CEO, but you've got a track record and a platform and you mean to use it. What marks you as a grassroots leader is the commitment that ignites the potent mixture of inner power and action. Stand in your truth and act on your values right here, right now, and touch the people around you.

What will you do? That's up to you. Tempered radicals, says author Debra Meyerson, draw on a five-part spectrum of possibilities ranging from "quietly resisting" to "collective action."

How will you do it? With passion, courage, modesty, fear, trepidation, commitment, the fellowship of colleagues—and perhaps even joy!

How successful will you be? That depends a lot on your persistence. You may fail at first. Or achieve real results that your mind dismisses as meaningless. But in time you will see the fruits of your commitment, if you're willing to look.

Why will you do it? Because you're already transformed and it's time to give it away. Because you were born to be the Light and pass the torch. Because your mission is bigger than your job.

Because this is the only game in town.

Because the transformation of capitalism depends on you—though not entirely. Give Spirit a chance and let the magic begin.

Part 2