Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(7)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I really wanted to like this book. It was Naisbitt's "Megatrends", and Peters' "In Search Of Excellence" that had initially turned me on to business/culture books that provoked interest and thought and dialogue, and helped develop personal growth.

There is just so much to learn from someone as distinguished and experienced as John Naisbitt. In fact, Mr. Naisbitt does take his readers on a global tour as attendees of his speeches and meetings. And yet, there is something missing that (at least for me) created a sense of ennui and paragraph skipping. At one point I felt so guilty that I was not giving the book a fair enough shot, I decided to begin anew and retrace the first 76 pages to revive my personal mind set. It still didn't happen for me.

For one thing, the book is a bit confusing. The majority of the book involves a description of 11 "mind sets" on which readers could evaluate past, present and future events. Fair enough. But the eleven mind sets were not especially insightful (e.g., Focus on the score of the game, Resistance to change falls if the benefits are real, Don't add unless you subtract et als.), and (too) often the examples were just too old/dated for too many people. (As a point of reference, I am nearing 60, and I am stunned by the lack of understanding of the historical significance of Viet Nam by bright young people under the age of 30. How, then, can many readers tie in the references to things happening at Harvard in the 50's, or when the author was part of the Kennedy Administration?).

And, then the author tries to connect his eleven mind sets to future trends. This part was pretty sketchy. Frankly, the thought that we are becoming a more visual society than one in which people sit idly by reading the next great novel, or burying themselves in five daily newspapers is hardly a revelation. Nor is the fact that China is ascending in terms of world significance a new idea. Nor too is the prediction that Europe will continue its descent into an irrelevant continent of countries in which a significant percentage of people will be on economy-killing welfare programs, while the rest are so despaired that they do not sufficiently bear children to pay for all the social largesse, all the while hating the American model of capitalism, a revelation of any depth.

Ultimately, I think that Mr. Naisbitt's Mind Set fails here because he has not kept pace with the height of the bar that he personally raised over twenty years ago. He references Megatrends (his 80's masterpiece which sold over 9 million copies) so many times, and with such reverence that I could sense that he was almost devining that you place Mind Set at the same level of distinction by association of his authorship. But, Megatrends was the seminal book of its time - so creative, so stimulating, and so important. Mind Set just isn't close to being in the same league.

Since then, other writers have raised the standard of business/cultural writing with well researched books that certainly challenge and stimulate the readers. They have expanded on the lessons learned from Megatrends, and they do it better than Mind Set.

As you can see from the other books that I have reviewed, I read many books in this genre. It is inevitable to compare/rate one book within the context of all the others that you have read, and, within this context, there are better books to read.

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.

I just had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of John Naisbitt's Mind Set!: Reset Your Thinking and See the Future. There's a lot in this book that I'd like to recommend for those who think everything is "the next big thing"... It's really not.

Contents:
Part 1 - Mindsets: Most Things Remain Constant; The Future Is Embedded In The Present; Focus On The Score Of The Game; Understand How Powerful It Is Not To Have To Be Right; See The Future As A Picture Puzzle; Don't Get So Far Ahead Of The Parade That They Don't Know You Are In It; Resistance To Change Falls For Benefits; Things That We Expect To Happen Always Happen More Slowly; You Don't Get Results By Solving Problems, But By Exploiting Opportunities; Don't Add Unless You Subtract; Consider The Ecology Of Technology
Part 2 - Pictures Of The Future: Culture - A Visual Culture Is Taking Over The World; Economics - From Nation-State To Economic Domains; China - Will The Dragon Devour Us Or Will It Be The Dragon We Ride?; Europe - Metamorphosis To History Theme Park; Our Evolutionary Era - No Next Big Thing
End Notes; Index

Naisbitt, the author of Megatrends, came up with a number of mindsets that can help someone understand where things are going in the future. From that initial list, he pared down the items until he came up with what he felt are the most important eleven items that matter. These mindsets, if understood, directly affect how you view current events and interpret your surroundings. For instance, it's easy to look at each new technology and think that it will change everything. But in reality, the same underlying forces continue to drive people's lives. Business is in a constant state of flux, but it still ends up being all about buying and selling. In sports, the one-handed jump shot in basketball completely changed the look of the game in 1936, but the game itself was still the same... score a basket. Once you strip away the fluff and hype, it's easier to understand where the general flow of life is going. Or my favorite... don't add something unless you subtract something. Setting a cap on a situation (be it a sports roster or a number of menu items in a restaurant) forces you to weigh the merits of each item, keeping only the things that return value and dropping items that no longer measure up to the others. Something to remember before you make yet another commitment...

Part 2 of the book applies a number of these mindsets to different current events and situations. Personally, I found this part of the book a bit more unfocused than the first. While I understand that the visual is becoming more important in today's society, I had a hard time staying focused on where the chapter was going. He does tie the mindsets into the conclusions he draws, but I found the mindsets themselves to be more personally useful for my own life.

Definitely worth reading, even if you don't necessarily agree with him on how the mindsets play out. I'll be revisiting the mindsets a number of times to get them firmly embedded in my brain. And don't be surprised if I turn down some "adds" because I'm not ready to "subtract" something...

I was expecting a lot from this book but I was in for a big disappointment. I really tried hard but when an author becomes unprofessional that is the absolute limit. I never had this feeling before of wanting to throw a book literally in the bin. I have read many similar books before but this book is not professional and certainly not scientific.

The subtitle "reset your thinking and see the future" becomes therefore pretty much a joke, especially when an author starts bashing in this case on Europe without real argumentations or facts. By doing so John Naisbitt exposes himself of being very unknowledgeable or unprepared for this book. It is a worrisome observation as it makes you wonder how John Naisbitt got to his other viewpoints for this book. If you have even minimal international experience you can write better chapters yourself.

Another reviewer at amazon.com even wrote that this author talked like a teenager going for a personal revenge against someone or something. Sadly I have to agree with this reviewer. And you simple don't pay for a book to read someone's narrow mind setting, frustrations and very poor made extrapolations. John Naisbitt just tries here to ride on his past-successes.

Regarding the "mindsets" offered I have to agree fully with the reviewer James A. Hatherley from Boston (reviewer at amazon.com). He wrote an excellent and even very polite (and similar negative) review of this book.

So really, forget this book and read "The world is flat" by Thomas L. Friedman instead: more insightful, much more objective and way better researched.

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.

I really can't call most of what's presented in this book a forecast. Instead, Naisbitt presents 11 "Mindsets" to help determine his forecasts. My favorite is Mindset #3 -- "FOCUS ON THE SCORE OF THE GAME" which reminds you to ignore the hype and see what's REALLY happening.

From his 11 mindsets, he paints 5 pictures of the world to come. Or more accurately, 5 pictures of what's ALREADY happening.

I think the book has value in framing the 11 mindsets. Use them and predict the future more accurately yourself!

I was really enjoying this book and Mr Naisbitt overview of the next future , but when I got to the Chapter about the future of Europe I couldn't believe what I was reading. From the very first paragraph I just saw a guy making "personal" attacks to Europeans. Mr Naisbitt a man of such higher culture and experience, talking like a hurted teenager, using a chapter of his book to take his personal revenge against someone or something, I don't know ..... not really professional I guess. I don't like to spend my money and my time reading that Europe is doomed just because we take too long vacation, (it's like saying that US is doomed if they keep eating hamburgers)
or because we are so stupid to believe in a strong economic grown that goes with a strong social campaign.
I am from Italy and I know we have some problems in our system, on the other hand we are trying to make Europe work and I can assure you that it's something new never tryed before, so it's not easy.
My opinion is that Europe has lot to learn from US and likewise US from Europe.
MINDSET is a great book, very easy to read and very pleasant , buy it and ready it (just skip Europe chapter).
Mr Naisbitt........Ad Maiora

Michelangelo B

Mediocre followup to earlier work. About two pages of each chapter are 98% of what is of at least modest value re ways of finding clues to future. But this fails because it is more about using media and other clues with noting substantive about understanding history or other cultures.

Seems mostly about financing his collection of modern art. Generally a waste of time.

John Naisbitt begins this book with a reference to the story The Little Prince by Antoine De Saint Exupery (a book I'd also recommend).

The reference Naisbitt makes to `The Little Price' is to how we don't see what is before us, only what we are able to see, and this idea echoes throughout the book.

In the first half of the book he describes eleven mindsets or ways through which we see and understand the world. The key point here is that the world doesn't exist for us to observe, it exists because we observe it, and exists only in the ways that we are able to observe it.

In describing each of the eleven mindsets Naisbitt describes the limitations of our current mindset and the opportunities of a new mindset.

Of the eleven mindsets I found the following particularly useful:-

4. Understanding how powerful it is not to have to be right
5. See the future a as picture puzzle.
9. You don't get results by solving problems but by exploiting opportunities.
11. Don't forget the ecology of technology

In the second half of the book he then takes some of these mindsets and applies them to what we are encouraged to call the `real world' and extrapolates some futures.

Here there are some interesting thoughts on our movement towards a visually centred culture, an economic shift from nation states to economic domains and some scathing perspectives on Europe. These serve as examples of what may be seen through a new mindset and the real jewel of the book is that it invites us to explore our own futures.

This is a thought provoking book, and well worth reading.

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.