How Things Change

October 30, 2009
Interview with John Naisbitt author of Mind Set!: Eleven Ways to Change the Way You See--and Create--the Future

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Mike Carruthers:
It sometimes appears that with computers and technology things are changing so fast today.

John Naisbitt:
And you know that this mantra in business about "the only consistency in business is change"? Well, that's just not true. Most things are constant.

John Naisbitt who authored the book Mega Trends has a new book out called  Mind Set!: Eleven Ways to Change the Way You See--and Create--the Future and he says that really big change - the next big thing - historically, happens about every 100 years.

And they come in clusters. The Industrial Revolution was a huge cluster of "next big things" that we're still working on even today after a couple of hundred years. At the start of the 20th century we had the telephone, and cars and airplanes and electricity and so on. And we spent a hundred years perfecting these great breakthroughs. And then at the end of the 20th century we had information technology, nano-technology, biotechnology that we're going to spend the next 50-100 years extending and perfecting.

So the next big thing is perhaps a hundred years away and John says in the mean time there will be a big shake out of all this new technology.

Just like when we began to have automobiles at the turn of the last century - 2600 automobile companies were created in the first 30 years of the 20th century as people tried to figure out what automobiles were. And then there's this long shake out period and we ended up with now, we only have two American automobile companies. 

To hear the complete unedited interview, click here.