Megatrends : ten new directions transforming our lives

"The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind" (J. M. Keynes). This book steps back from those surroundings and confronts us with the decisive shift occurring in the world's major power as it transforms from an industrial to an information society. John Naisbitt is supremely well qualified to observe this with his personal experience of the highest levels of American business and government as well as his Group's profound studies of American society. He follows in the tradition of Herman Khan and Alvin Toffler with the practical approach to management of Peter Drucker, an American way of thought that continues to prove a power-house of ideas. The book's relevance to non-American readers is direct and immediate.

In this history of the future the critical trends in the USA are drawn out and the non-American reader will have no difficulty in recognizing the parallels. Some of the trends can reasonably be said to have been experienced first in Britain: the decline of industrial activity to be replaced by efficient service companies whose means of production is knowledge and whose product information is a new entrepreneurship and a spirit of self-help with less confidence in the central authorities to get it right, whether from government or business.