Book Review : A Mini-Book Takes Stock Both Narrowly and Trendily
The Year Ahead by John Naisbitt and the Naisbitt Group (Amacom, American Management Assn: $6.95)
1--Unemployment starts to give way to labor shortages as the birth dearth succeeds the baby boom. 2--Latinos overtake blacks as America’s largest minority group. 3--Employees take a larger hand in management and, through ESOPs (employee stock ownership plans), even in ownership of American business. 4--New electronic equipment--including interactive videodiscs, robots and new computer software--appears in the classroom. 5--”Bypassing” becomes more popular: Major companies set up their own phone systems; major plants generate or “co-generate” their own electricity; executives take more helicopters than ever. 6--There are many new developments in biotechnology, and Texas--especially San Antonio--has the lead. 7--Pesticides, food additives and hormones used in raising animals cause cancer and other diseases; “. . . much of our food is polluted. In 1985, the controversy will erupt.” 8--Stocks are traded around the clock and around the world; the computer is more important than “the floor.” 9--AT&T; is getting into computers, and IBM is getting into communications; the two technologies are increasingly inseparable. 10--Convenience counts for more than it ever did--in everything from medicine to fast food.
Have You Heard It Before?
Thus far, the 10 mini-chapters of the mini-book “The Year Ahead,” as offered, when the year was fresh, by the Naisbitt Group. We are told beneath the small print on the copyright page that the book draws “from the data base and publications of the Naisbitt Group,” including The Trend Report, a quarterly for clients; The Bellwether Report, a monthly, and John Naisbitt’s Trend Letter, a biweekly newsletter. So, if you seem to have heard these songs before, there may be a reason.
One trend that the Naisbitt Group does not mention is the trend in publishing toward shorter and shorter books and magazines at, relatively speaking, higher and higher prices. A specialized, information-packed book from a technical publisher might cost $.10 per page; 300 pages, $30, and only a few thousand purchasers. A book of same size intended for a wider audience could scarcely be priced at more than $.05 per page; 300 pages, $14.95. “The Year Ahead” at $6.95 and 62 pages cost $.11 per page. The strategy is the same in newsletters. A full year’s subscription to a skinny newsletter may come to fewer pages than a single issue of a standard magazine.
Ah, but the information, the insider information, is worth it.
Do You Need This?
Or is it? Did you need “The Year Ahead” to learn that Latinos are a growing minority group? Or that new equipment is showing up in the classroom? There is little here that a moderately attentive reader of the Los Angeles Times (or any other major paper) will not already have come across. Perhaps “The Year Ahead” is intended to serve as a kind of “executive summary” of the news for leaders who do not have time to read the newspaper. But, in that case, we are faced with a paradox: The book is outsider information that insiders no longer have time for.
Four more particular objections can be raised:
1--The book is misleadingly upbeat. Trends are signaled by failures as well as by successes, but the Naisbitt Group never mentions a failure. Orange County has not forgotten the failure of a much-publicized joint IBM-MCA venture in videodisc, but the Naisbitt Group has. Certain worrisome areas of technology--like the nuclear-power industry--are passed over in total silence. Energy itself is simply not a topic in “The Year Ahead.”
2--The book is narrowly American. Is it smart trend-watching to discuss the growth of the Latino population without mentioning Mexico? The Naisbitt Group is more impressed that there are Latino advertising agencies than that the peso may be devalued this year. Immigration as a trend is not mentioned. Naisbitt shuns politics.
Implausible Predictions
3--Some of the predictions are worse than implausible. The year is half gone, and we are still waiting for the food-pollution controversy to “erupt.” Many educators, not to speak of legislators, would challenge the Naisbitt claim that “so far, use of robots as secondary education tools is rare, but in a few years they’re likely to be as common as desk-top computers.”
Speaking of desk-top computers, there is not a breath in “The Year Ahead” about troubles in the personal computer industry. (I did like, no doubt for the wrong reasons, a Naisbitt headline, “Robots in Classrooms Turn Heads Around.”)
4--Few of the predictions predict 1985 events. Trends do not occur on an annual basis. If your business is trend-watching, then your publication schedule should not be annual. There is a logic to continual reporting and monitoring, another kind of logic to periodic stock-taking. The 365-day year, however, seems a unit with little logic other than the opportunity to present old data in a new format. This is less a new publishing trend than a perennial bad habit.
