Mind Set!: Eleven Ways to Change the Way You See--And Create--The Future

by John Naisbitt

Book Overview

In his seminal works Megatrends and Megatrends 2000, John Naisbitt proved himself one of the most far-sighted and accurate observers of our fast-changing world.

Mind Set goes beyond that by disclosing the secret of forecasting. Naisbitt gives away the keys to the kingdom, opening the door to the insights that let him understand today's world and see the opportunities of tomorrow. He selects his most effective tools, 11 Mindsets, and applies...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0061136891
• ISBN13: 9780061136894
• Release Date: December 2008
• Publisher: HarperBusiness
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 0.55 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Mind Set!

I am a hungarian student at University of Economics in Budapest and I purchased this book in ordet to prepare my degree work. The book was very usefull for me and the language easy to understand even with my not very high level english knowledge. The content is really professional at the same time easy to understand. I am sad that the book is not issued in Hungarian language. I highly recommend it.

A good place to start

This is the first time I've read a book trying to predict the future, so, as a novice in this area I've got to say that the book was excelent. It got me to focus upon areas that I've frankly never bothered with in the past. And as a european, I found his thoughts on europe and our politicians to be quite an eye opener. Other reviewers of this book say that there are better books out there, but if you're a newcomer to this type of thought and forecasting then this book isn't going to waste your time.

Mind Set and the Future

Mind Set and the Future I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the future, the present, or the past. Only someone of Naisbitt's stature and winning streak, when it comes to predicting the future, could make the claims he makes in this book sound so reasonable and so convincing. In the age of information overload, projections (the extrapolation of the present into the future based on received wisdom) are like rabbits in Australia; we do not really need more of them. Naisbitt, who is the senior statesman of futurology, goes straight to the essence of things in Mind Set. He develops a set of eleven frameworks that allows the reader to detect, observe, analyze, and react to future trends and five general directions that are in our event horizon. Not the projections, Naisbitt wisely pointed out, it is the Mind Set that needs to be elucidated! Back in the mid-Nineteen Nineties, I attended a lecture with about a thousand other people in an auditorium. We had all come to hear the author of Megatrends speak. At that lecture Naisbitt predicted rather nonchalantly that Japan was in the midst of a steady, slow decline. His statement was met with incredulity and would have been ridiculed by the audience, if the speaker of those words had been anyone other than Naisbitt. When an eminent Japanese friend of mine challenged him about his prediction, Naisbitt deflected the question with panache, like the pro that he was. Back then, Japan was still number one and it was easy to see why people at that lecture were having so much trouble with Naisbitt's assertion. Everyone thought Japan would take over every industry in the world and that their superiority was inherent in their national character! But what followed was a decade of economic morass for Japan just as predicted in Megatrends Asia. Naisbitt was one of the first to point out Japan's decline publicly. What I found admirable about Naisbitt was that when he believed in something no matter how unpopular the stance, he had the fortitude and the integrity to stick to his guns. And as it turned out, he was right about Japan! Just as he was able to do a decade ago in his other works, it is obvious to me that Mind Set will also stir up controversy with many people today, not the least of whom are those who have a religious belief in global warming. Nobody really knows if the earth is warming up or is in the upswing of a cold-warm cycle. I found it amusing that, in the same year, 2006, former President Bill Clinton, as mentioned in the book, would warn against the impending ice age and his former vice president would win an Oscar for warning us about global warming. Not aware of Clinton's admonition before reading the book, I thank the author for pointing it out to me. Naisbitt's lack of condemnation of George W. Bush's neo-conservative agenda of spreading democracy through war, no doubt, will freak out many more people. The author approached the issue by way of analyzing t

11 Mindsets for predicting some future trends

1. The 21st century will be the century of change. More things will change in more places in the next 10 years than in the previous 100. While many things change most things will remain constant. For example, people will still read paperback books in 10 years and publisher will print more books at a stagger pace. 2. The future is embedded in the present. The future being embedded in the present does not mean extrapolating everything into the future. It means finding seeds of the future in the ground and not in the wide sky. In other words, change will take time and don't get to far from what the crowd thinks and is demanding as emerging trends, products and services. 3. Fads themselves are embedded in trends and are a manifestation of trends. Shifts in trends do not occur very often, but the fads that the trends have embedded inspire change of the time- thus the word faddish; for example, the shift from the industrial society to the informational society. Among other things, this shift has meant that we have become predominantly sedentary workers. Workers are concerned about physical exercise and about what they eat, diet. Dieting is outrageously faddish. 4. The emerging individualism in the world is reflected in the reduction in membership in organized unions and growing affluence. Unions did not reinvent or reconceptualize their role and so U.S labor unions went from 25 percent to 7.8 percent in the private sector as is still falling. Confluence forces are the key. Always ask yourself if there are enough different forces at work pushing in the same direction, before you make a judgment. 5. The great source of knowledge about the future is the newspapers. Look at newspapers as if you were reading them 100 years from now. 6. Focus on the game score. Germany is behind in the economic score. Germany economy has no growth at all, zero, the sick man of Europe. In every single year since the announcement in 2000, Europe has lost economic ground against the United States. 7. GM is a horrible bind with a $1,600 per vehicle handicap in legacy costs, mostly health and pension benefits. Normally a company in such straits would contract until it reaches equilibrium: 4 million cars instead of 5.1 million and reducing U.S market share to 20 percent, a worker cost-competitive health-care plan, layoffs, and returning profit into auto sales and financing operations. However, Union agreements don't allow the automaker to close plants or lay off workers without paying a stiff penalty, no matter how far its sales or profits fall. 8. Immigration is constantly replenishing US talent pool and it isn't chance that the US has 300 Nobel Prize winners. 9. It is powerful to understand that one does not have to be right. "Authority slavery is one of the biggest enemies of truth." Listening is an essential skill. Einstein inconsequential babble resulting in four papers that changed the world of physics: 1. energy properties of light 2. true size of a

Very thought provoking

This is a totally original book. I've never seen a presentation of "mind sets that help me process information, recognize trends, and take pictures of the future." Of course you may not agree with all of Naisbitt's mind sets (after all, they are his, not yours) and his pictures of the future (they are certainly compelling - and because he's "not afraid to be wrong," he's laid his opinions right out there), but this book will make you think in new ways about your job and about the world. In particular, I really enjoyed the first half of the book that gave Naisbitt's 11 main mind sets.