In recent years, as John Naisbitt gave speeches across all continents and advised political and business leaders across the world, he would be asked with greater and greater frequency: “How do you know what you know? How do go about making these insights? How can we learn the process?”
In Mind Set!, John Naisbitt reveals how to develop and experience the power of 11 cognitive tools that will allow readers to understand the trends transforming their daily life and the world around them, so they can anticipate and act on the future. In a narrative that is captivating in its scope and reach––ranging from Yao Ming and the NBA to Goethe and Global Domains––Naisbitt liberates readers from the limitations of our routine ways of thinking with a step–by–step program to incorporate these new attitudes of mind and apply them in making decisions.
Naisbitt’s Mind Set! has the actionable, big ideas and global economic forecasting that senior executives are demanding of high–level books today. Just as powerfully, the stories, examples, and voice of Mind Set! will connect with the non–business reader from the suburbs to the college campus. Underlying the mind sets is Naisbitt’s sensibility that we need greater balance between the pace of technological change and the humanistic skills of self–knowledge, and his faith in the endless promise and power of learning.
Customer Reviews
Pleasantly surprised!:
Had to read this for a Macroeconomics class. Thought it would be dry. Boy, was I wron 
This is a great book about the thought patterns of modern Americans and how to look ahead with out being too far ahead of the “parade”. Way to go Naisbitt!!
Learning to read Trends - Useful YES - Practical - MAYBE:
As you prepare to operate in the business world, one of the most useful and rewarding skills that you could develop is the ability to read trends. Working in the business world can be compared to surfing: the surfer sits on their board behind the breaking waves staring out at the horizon watching for the next big wave. When they see a big wave building up they turn their board toward the shore, lie down and begin paddling to build some forward momentum so that when the wave reaches them, they can catch it and ride it towards the shore. The bigger and more powerful the wave the better the ride. To be successful in business one also needs to ride waves, these waves are called trends. As a business person one needs to be “looking over the horizon” for the next trends and positioning oneself to ride the trend when it arrives. The bigger and more powerful the trend the more successful the ride. Some recent business trends include:
* Outsourcing - increased amounts of work being outsourced to regions of the world where labour is relatively cheap e.g. the processing of US tax returns being outsourced to India.
* Open source software development - more and more software is being developed by individuals from all over the world working in collaboration with one another from the comfort of their own homes and doing all of this for free e.g. The Firefox web browser and Ubuntu operating system.
* Online expression - many people are expressing themselves publicly in online forums. Look at the number of people with personal blogs or “MySpace” websites or publishing video on “YouTube”.
How does one develop the ability to read business trends? Is it a skill that can be learned or is it more of an intuitive sense?
One of the people who has been most successful at reading trends over the past 30 years is John Naisbitt. In the 1980’s and 1990’s he published two bestselling books that examined trends for the future, Megatrends and Megatrends 2020. Both of these books were incredibly insightful and accurate and won him wide acclaim and credibility as a trend spotter.
In his most recent book entitled “Mindset”, published in late 2006, he shares many of his secrets for spotting trends. He highlights eleven mindsets that have enabled him pick up on what is going on in the world today and project that into the future. The book is practical, insightful and incredibly easy to read and to apply. These mindsets, if applied, will give anyone going into a career in consulting, technology, strategy, marketing, investments or wanting to be an entrepreneur a massive head start.
To give you an insight into the book, here are three of the eleven mindsets that he shares:
* “The future is embedded in the present” - if one pays close attention to what is going on in the world today, it creates an excellent insight into what is likely to happen in the future. John Naisbitt gathers most of insight into the future by reading regional news papers and current affairs magazines from across the globe. He uses the news of today to make predictions about tomorrow.
* Focus on the score - one can easily get tied up and distracted by anecdotal evidence but the real truth is in the numbers. In soccer if the score is 3-1 then no matter how well the team that only scored one goal played, they still lost. In business we need to look at the numbers and measure the likelihood of economic success from the numbers e.g. is the unemployment rate decreasing, is GDP per capita growing etc.
* Understand how powerful it is not to have to right - in making predictions about the future, people are paralyzed by the need to be right and therefore never make a predication about a trend and as a result never take action. If one releases oneself from the need to always be right, then one is far more likely to take the bold step of making a predication and taking action. Rather make a prediction and be marginally wrong than say and do nothing at all.
This is an good book that comes highly recommended for those who want to position themselves for a successful career in business.
MIND SET by John Naisbitt:
John Naisbitt is the popular business thinker who helps leaders understand what comes next. In MEGATRENDS, he spoke about “high tech/high touch” being key for success in the future. In GLOBAL PARADOX he warned that the reality of a global market will set off a simultaneous increase in tribalism.
In this book, Naisbitt is less concerned with predicting the future but in disclosing the way he thinks through the information he reads:
“Mindsets work like fixed stars in our heads. Holding on to them, our mind finds orientation. They keep it on course and guide it safely to its destination.”
There are eleven mindsets in the book. But the premier one is “Understand how powerful it is not to have to be right.” I find that easy to say.
My favorite Mindset is “While Many Things change, Most Things Remain Constant.” Leaders can be driven into hysteria by the drumbeat of change, change, change. Naisbitt does acknowledge that actually fads, fashion, and technology do change dramatically. But most of the core goals of people’s lives remain constant. Most change is in how we do what we do. The reasons why we do what we do tend to be as stable as men’s fashion. Home, family, and work are the great constants. The rhythm of life is still determined primarily by the seasons. As leaders are we reacting to temporary fads or responding to true trends.
One true trend is that professional sports will be the framework for talent management in business. And local sports teams seek the best talent on the planet. On opening day of the 2006 baseball season, 30% of all major-league players were foreign-born. In the minor leagues, 50% of the players are foreign born. The 2005 National Basketball Association champions were the San Antonio Spurs. Seven of its 12 man team were not from the United States. Outsourcing of talent is not just about shipping low wage jobs overseas. There will be “amazing opportunities” for talented individuals to serve on a global basis. And there will be “amazing opportunities” for small to medium sized firms to be outsourced providers to large companies.
Laurence Stybel
Board Options, Inc.
[…]
Intellectual Basis for Futurism with Brief Examples:
Before considering if you want to read Mind Set! please realize that this book is quite different from Megatrends, Megatrends Asia, and Megatrends 2000. Those books attempted to describe the key elements of the future world that were still new and unfamiliar at the time: That’s the key task of futurists.
Mind Set! by comparison, is a book about the methodology that Professor Naisbitt applies to take the information he gleans from local newspapers to discern the face of tomorrow. Mind Set! concludes with five brief examples of how to uses these methods.
If you are looking for a futurist’s view on 2027, this isn’t the book for you.
In fact, it’s interesting that Professor Naisbitt has written this book at all: Futurist work and interest in it seems to be at quite a low ebb now.
To me, the book’s main weakness is that he says less about how to acquire the information he analyzes than in prior books. You have to wonder how long local newspapers accounts will forecast the future: The local newspaper business is dying. To me, it would have been far more interesting to have looked at how the blogosphere can be used to supplement or replace local newspapers for this purpose.
What are the mind sets he uses? Let me paraphrase them so they make more sense:
1. Unimportant everyday details change a lot: the fundamentals of life remain constant. His caution is to avoid getting carried away with seeing temporary trends as permanent changes.
2. The future already exists: you only need to extrapolate from it. This is a hoary point that I assume he got from Peter Drucker.
3. Focus on the score of the game: look at the actual measures. Politicians and newsmakers try to bend our perspectives away from what’s happening. The key numbers tell the real story.
4. Understand how powerful it is not to have to be right: massive failures follow those who blindly follow a doctrine (whether fascism or communism).
5. See the future as a picture puzzle: assemble your perspective by seeing how a variety of current trends fit together. Don’t rely on any one source to answer the whole question.
6. Don’t project ahead of what people can appreciate: otherwise, the new perspective adds no value. Seemingly, an argument in favor of blandness, this is simply the old test of connecting the dots.
7. People will change to gain improvements. It’s easy to overestimate resistance, in particular, to new technology that requires us to change our habits.
8. Things that we expect to happen take longer than expected. Remember the forecasts of everyone owning a car-plane in the 1950s? We should be all using them by now.
9. Breakthrough change comes only when someone can exploit an unusual opening, such as happened after the fall of communism. Those who try to solve problems through government action aren’t going to be very successful.
10. Don’t overload people with perspectives and details.
11. Evaluate technology in terms of the nontechnical constraints.
In each of these sections, Professor Naisbitt provides his aphorism and a few examples. In most cases, I think you’ll find the material to be suggestive rather than instructional in nature. If you already have a sense of how to do forecasting, that’s okay. If you are totally new, I think you’ll be a little at sea.
About 60 percent of the book is then devoted to five future projections where he briefly mentions (one page on each one), the principles he primarily replied on to reach these conclusions. The weakness of this section is that the conclusions are so obvious as to make you feel like futurism is a waste of time. It would have made more sense to pick less obvious areas for demonstrating his conclusions.
1. Videos, attractive designs, use of color, and visual imagery are replacing the written word as a key influence.
2. Industries are organizing globally for supply, distribution, and production rather than by nation.
3. China’s economic growth will continue, to be followed by political freedom. The nation will become a global design and branding base, rather than just a source of low-cost production labor.
4. Europe will experience slow growth, burdened with below-replacement birth rates, tough policies against immigration, and high social welfare costs.
5. The importance of new technologies will slow down while the application of technologies developed in recent years will accelerate. Although he doesn’t directly say it, biotechnology and nanotechnology are immensely slow methods of invention. He sees nothing else on the horizon that could cause a sudden shift. This is a good point. Generally, technology takes forever to move into mainstream application.
After having read this review, I also think you need to consider what the role of the futurist is: Perhaps they just keep us from jumping on trendy ideas too far. That can be good. Most of the biggest corporate crack-ups I’ve seen up close came because the leaders believed the world was going to change faster than it did. They raced ahead to serve markets then that still don’t exist.
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 the European Union’s attempt to supplant the United States economic and cultural hegemony around the world. Personally, I thought that the US foreign policy of spreading the ideology of her own brand of democracy militarily was misguided and, in Iraq, disastrous. Despite such differences with the author, I still thanked him for laying out his position on these issues in his book in a sober and enlightening manner.
As is ubiquitous of most great works of the imagination, the reader sees a perfectly rendered version of the world filtered through the mind of the artist or the philosopher. This is also true in John Naisbitt’s Mind Set. One of the great pleasures of reading this book is that the author, a connoisseur of fine art and architecture, imbues his pages with a love and insight of High Culture. One gets to cadge his discerning eyes in art in addition to his incisive mind. Naisbitt’s erudition abounds on almost every page. His eclectic mix of references range from Aristotle to events occurring in 2006, and from Nicolaus Copernicus to Darwin, et al. When he cited a letter from Albert Einstein’s youth, he made a childhood idol of mine endearingly human to me. Naisbitt’s personal reminiscences about his encounters with the high and mighty as well as with the low and meek gave the book a kind of humanity that one does not normally associate with books written by authors from the business world.
I highly recommend this book. For in youth you may find vibrancy; in maturity, wisdom.
