2020 Trends

I’m having a clearout of my office and I keep stumbling on various things. Here’s the cover from someting I did 10 years ago, along with a list of 10 trends for 2010. They seem pretty on the ball for 2020. Someone once said that I’m 10-years ahead of everyone else, which perhaps could be read as meaning that anything I say now can’t be assessed, or isn’t meaningful, until 2030.

2010 + Ten Trends

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Here’s the promised link for my 2010 + 10 Trends: Predictions and Provocations report. Note it’s 36 pages and the file size is about 5 megs. Personally I don’t like it for some reason. No idea why.
http://www.nowandnext.com/PDF/2010_complete.pdf

The link also appears as hyperlink in ‘comments’ below.

Coming Soon

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I wrote most of this back in December and blogged about it extensively in early January. However, I’ve finally got around to putting it together nicely as a proper report (been a bit busy with the new book!). Free downloadable pdf coming soon…

Boring is the new exciting

Takeaway from lunch with my mate Steve who works in funds management. According to Steve greed and stupidity are back. “So what’s changed?” I said. “Trust has evaporated” said Steve. Consequences? Possibly that the demand for simplicity with increase, as will the desire for authenticity and transparency.

BTW, I know that this post totally contradicts my last post, which was about sound bites, but get over it.

Localism

Remember ‘Globalisation Unravelling’ – one of my top ten trends for 2010? Here’s a nice example. According to the Times newspaper, McDonald’s in Britain is “listening more to local consumers:.something McDonald’s has sought increasingly to do around the world.” Moreover, “there are now signs that other multinationals are trying to boost their fortunes globally by emulating McDonald’s in stressing and accentuating their localism.”

Other cited examples include Starbucks that has been experimenting with locally designed stores and Tesco who are adopting a more local approach to overseas expansion. It’s not just food companies and retailers though. I was recently in a meeting with someone who worked with Toyota and he used the phrase “Multi-local’ in reference to their strategy. Or how about a feature in the current issue of Strategy + Business magazine (US) on Back shoring (similar to my own re-sourcing trend).

Looks like the future might be local.

Article links: See comments below.
Thanks for Penny for this btw.

Digital Death

Regular readers might (just) remember that one of my top 10 trends for 2009 (i.e. last year) was ‘Digital Diets’. It didn’t happen. But wait…it’s happening now!

This is just in from Sean Boyle at JWT in New York. Rock star John Mayer has blogged* that his fans should join him for a weekly ‘digital cleanse.’ Meanwhile, if things really get too much you can now use something called the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.

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No, this isn’t anything physically nasty. Just a way of getting rid of your digital friends. Once you nominate a social network you relinquish your login details to the machine and it proceeds to change your password so that you can no longer access your account. It then systematically deletes every one of your friends from that particular platform and frees you from the shackles of social media.Facebook has blocked the application but Twitter, MySpace and LinkedIn have yet to do so.

* I know, the irony of doing this on a blog!