Peering Into Tomorrow

John Naisbitt, founder of a thriving business based on forecasting change, cities 10 'megatrends' he claims are already shaping our future.

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A few years ago a small company moved into a former gas station in my neighborhood and erected a sign out front that advertised auto rust-proofing. Now the sign says "The Car Preservation Center." Those folks are still in the rustproofing business but today they also restore paint, refurbish interiors, clean vinyl tops, and do just about anything else you can think of to keep an old car looking new. So far as I know, this company has never heard of the Naisbitt Group and assuredly never subscribed to The Trend Report it puts out for $15,000, three times a year. But John Naisbitt would most certainly recognize and applaud what the former rustproofers have done: They have "reconceptualized" their business in response to a trend.

The trend in question, of course, is based on the simple fact that, because of high prices and higher interest rates, Americans today are keeping their cars longer than ever before. It is the kind of trend Naisbitt makes his living spotting. Naisbitt thinks that a lot of Americans, and American companies, will have to reconceptualize in the years ahead to stay in business. His job is to help them do so by alerting them to the trends that will shape their futures.

For the past 12 years Naisbitt has been taking familiar information, rearranging it, and selling it back to some of the largest corporations in the United States. For the minimum annual fee of $15,000, his corporate clients, mostly giant companies like General Motors, Sears, and American Broadcasting, receive The Trend Report, plus a chance to send top executives to seminars Naisbitt and his colleagues sponsor to help the executives interpret the information. The Report is a loose-leaf binder filled with pie charts, bar graphs, and reports on subjects ranging from overcrowding in day-care centers to a census of religious sects.

What Naisbitt sees when he looks 12 to 18 months or more down the road is not a gee-whiz kind of future: no personal aircars in every backyard, no push-button factories, no food pills or smell-o-visions. His visions are different, but not divorced, from the present. In large measure this is a result of the techniques he and his two dozen employees use to prepare their forecasts. The primary method used is called content analysis, and it has been around for a while.

During World War II, for example, U.S. intelligence officials used content analysis to track conditions inside Germany. While the Germans were unlikely to announce to the Allies that food supplies were running short, local German newspapers carrying stories about lengthening lines at meat markets made the fact crystal clear. The Central Intelligence Agency still uses content analysis in similar fashion, as do some academic researchers.

Content analysis, as the Naisbitt Group applies it, is also largely based on reading newspapers. Each day, company researchers in the Naisbitt Group's Washington, D.C., and Denver offices, and in the offices of an independent Stamford, Conn., database company, pore over the daily papers of cities in the United States with a population greater than 100,000, plus papers covering all state capitals regardless of population. These newspapers reach, collectively, 94% of the total U S. population every day. The researchers clip every local hard-news item sort them into 1 of 13 broad categories then sort them again into some 200 additional subcategories.

Then two things happen. First, the number of lines devoted to each topic are counted. Newspapers have only limited space for news, explains Naisbitt. So if one story goes in, another has to come out. Keeping track of the changes in the amount of space given to specific topics from quarter to quarter gives his analysts a way to measure quantitatively the society's changing concerns and priorities, by broad category and by subtopic.

Second, the clips from each of the 13 categories are read by the same person each month. Any changes in behavior patterns, even one or two anomalies from different parts of the country, "tend to jump out at you," says Jeffrey Hallett, co-owner and president of the Naisbitt Group. Analysts who cover all 13 categories then sit down together and compare notes. Changes in one category are related to changes in others. Out of all this comes a set of emerging trends.

For example, the final Trend Report of 1981 revealed that news stories relating to the law, crime, and prisons declined fairly steadily between 1975 and 1980, from 13% to a bit more than 8% of the total news space. But in 1981 the proportion jumped up again to 13.5%.

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