By Ellen Stuhlmann

clear sense of the future empowersdecisions, gives insights into new opportunities, and provides an invaluableperspective of you and of your businessin a bigger world. Therefore, the ability to keep on top of fast-changing, far-flung,intersecting trends is a critical skill forevery executive.Professional futurist, Eric Garlandin his new book,

FUTURE, INC.: How Businesses Can Anticipate and Profit fromWhat’s Next,

shows that this ability tolook for changes on the horizon andgauge the impact is not that difficult.By combining a few simple techniques with curiosity about what’s currently hap-pening everywhere — you can predict what is most likely to matter tomorrow.Eric Garland was very generous insharing his time and thoughts about how you can develop the ability to predict what’s coming and what trends youshould keep on your radar.

Q. You advise business leaders tobecome futurists. What habits orqualities should they cultivate toanticipate what’s next? A.

The most important quality is the abil-ity to think about your business in termsof holistic systems. This is really tough ina world of increasing specialization. Mostunexpected future changes come fromoutside your field of expertise — other- wise you would notice them quite natu-rally! Today, demographics, informationtechnology, media and communications,healthcare, materials science — all thesefields are interacting at an unprecedentedrate. You must practice thinking abouthow these fields come together:

•

aging populations + informationtechnology

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Latino youth + media

•

China + healthcareIt’s this sense of what I call

supercon-nection

that will allow you to cultivatea perspective on the future and let youact before it’s too late.My favorite example of this comesfrom the record industry and their reac-tion to the MP3. Record executives wereso surprised by these “outside” technolo-gies, they were left suing teenagers tostem the damage from illegal download-ing. They were experts in their industry,but they weren’t watching the largerchanges in information technology. Whencheap memory, increasing ownership of home computers and the Internet allcame together with the transition to theall-digital compact disc, their means of distribution changed overnight. If youasked them in 1995, they would havesaid “we’re not in the computer business.”Maybe not, but computers changed themusic business all the same.Holistic thinking is going to keepyou from being blindsided. Every com-pany is innovating and trying to improvetheir core services and products. Think of two companies — Bethlehem Steeland IBM. Both refined their productsevery year; both companies were innova-tive in the traditional sense. Of the two,only IBM looks out at the future of business information in a holistic man-ner, seeing trends other than just com-puting. To keep relevant to the future,they barely make hardware anymore!Bethlehem Steel looked only at the cur-rent model of steel — and they don’texist any longer.I remember an interview with oneof Bethlehem Steel’s corporate plannersback in 1993. This executive braggedthat he didn’t let “intellectual curiosity”about externalities get in his way of see-ing the future. He claimed his success was only focusing on today’s numbers,and not letting distractions from the wider world change the company’s plans.I think we can see the fruits of that kindof thinking.To anticipate the future and profitfrom it, you must see broadly and be flex-ible about how you will need to change.

Q. New technologies are transforming the world so quickly today — how canan executive keep ahead of the curve inspotting trends, distinguish them fromfads, and trust that investment in thefuture he envisions is smart business? A.

To see the future you must collecttrend data from reliable sources. I believethat every executive should be able to citeat least five trends about what will createthe future. What’s more, they should bethe most relevant trends in terms of strat-egy, not just what’s most sensational atthe moment. We live in a world dominated by 24/7/365 media. In order to keep ourfleeting attention, those media sourcesmust constantly bombard us with increas-ingly sensational stories. Consider the factthat CNBC was seriously trying to ana-lyze the effect of the death of AnnaNicole Smith on American financial mar-kets. As a result, the media does not giveexecutives a sense of what are really rele-vant changes.I tell leaders

get the hard data

about what is really changing your world. Twomentions in Newsweek does not a trendmake. Remember in 2001 when themedia went crazy about shark attacks on America’s beaches? Weeks of stories aboutshark attacks bombarded the American

|CareerSmart Advisor

Books Worth Your Time

What is Most Likely to Matter Tomorrow?

Eric Garland, author of

Future, Inc: How Businesses Can Anticipate and Profit from What’s Next,

is a professional futurist(CompetitiveFutures.com). He is an advisor to executives at topcorporations and government agencies as an expert in futuresresearch and competitive intelligence. His dozens of major clientsinclude Ford, Coca-Cola, Johnson & Johnson, Siemens, Wyethand Goodyear.Continued on page 7