Mega-Optimists : Social forecasters John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene see the ‘90s as a decade of unparalleled opportunity.

John Naisbitt maneuvered the Jeep Cherokee carefully along snow-packed Colorado Avenue, pointing out landmarks with the pride of a city father. “The Opera House is that way and there’s the Town Hall,” he said. “We have a town marshal and a county sheriff because we’re the county seat.”

“And we vote on everything,” added his wife, Patricia Aburdene. “We even voted on whether to have a Grateful Dead concert here.”

Telluride (population 1,200), a travel-poster ski resort tucked in a box canyon and ringed by the snow-capped San Juan range of the Rockies, is home to Naisbitt and Aburdene. It’s where they vote and pay taxes and seek rest and recreation from the demanding global lecture schedule that has consumed them since 1982, when the phenomenal successes of Naisbitt’s first book, “Megatrends,” transformed their lives.

The book, described by its author as a “road map for the 1980s,” was aimed at helping people understand change. In it, Naisbitt--a former business executive who had been concentrating on social trend analysis--examined 10 major patterns that he saw as shaping the future of America.

“Megatrends,” which jumped immediately to the bestseller list and stayed there for two years, sold more than 8 million copies (at last count) around the world.

It also catapulted the energetic Naisbitt to prominence as a speaker who could captivate and energize business groups with his positive assessment of the future. (The last line of the book: “My God, what a fantastic time to be alive!” indicates the extent of the author’s unbridled optimism, an attitude that prompted a New York Times reviewer to dismiss the book as “the literary equivalent of a good after-dinner speech.”)

With Aburdene, who contributed to “Megatrends,” Naisbitt in 1985 wrote “Re-inventing the Corporation,” also a bestseller. The book, described by one reviewer as “the bible of change in the workplace,” described how the traditional business structure--hierarchical and authoritarian--is being replaced by humanistic businesses that emphasize personal growth. The authors not only described some of the new corporate prototypes but also provided a “how to” checklist for the business person seeking such change.

The book launched Naisbitt and Aburdene, who both have business backgrounds (he had held executive positions at IBM and Eastman Kodak; she was a reporter-researcher at Forbes Magazine when they met), into a collaborative career.

They get more than 100 requests a year for personal appearances, of which they accept about 60%.

And now they have written their second broad-brush trend book, “Megatrends 2000: Ten New Directions for the 1990s,” which contains such upbeat forecasts as a booming global economy, a renaissance for the arts and, most significantly in terms of a forecast that has been overtaken by events, the emergence of free-market socialism.

Published by William Morrow & Co. Inc., the book has just been delivered to the nation’s bookstores and the authors launched a two-week, 16-city promotional blitz this week.

Explained their editor, Adrian Zackheim, vice president of William Murrow: “We look on this as a very, very major event. It’s the first major trend book in eight years and a lot has happened. Suddenly the year 2000 is close.”

In preparation for the major event, Naisbitt and Aburdene spent the first few days of the new decade basking in the serenity of Telluride and polishing their act.

“We’ve given enough lectures together now that we’ve learned how to alternate as speakers,” volunteers Aburdene, “but we still have to be careful that we aren’t talking on top of each other.”

Their ability to share a speaking platform is unusual, says Bill Leigh, whose Princeton, N.J., bureau handles their engagements. “I’ve never seen another program out there where this joint-play really works. It’s very much their relationship--something they have evolved together.”

Their close relationship is evident in public and private. Although they have spent most of their lives on the East Coast, Naisbitt, 61, and Aburdene, 42, wearing heavy sweaters, pants and snow boots, share the healthy, outdoorsy look and vigorous enthusiasm for new ideas that befits their sparkling mountain setting.

The two writers, who live together, work together, travel together and lecture together seem almost symbiotic--a model of mutuality.

“The world’s leading trend forecasters,” as the book jacket describes them, sat, one recent afternoon, in the soaring living room of their showpiece house (designed by Theodore Brown of San Francisco), a multilevel chalet of pine logs and bleached adobe that perches above town like a minor castle. Its pitched eaves, octagonal windows, balconies and bridges reflect the storybook quality of Telluride; the high ceilings, tiled floors and Indian art complement the artistry of its Western-Southwestern setting.

A book-lined loft study overlooks comfortable chairs and couches in the double-height living room. A fax machine clicks in the background. Like its owners, the high-tech/high-touch home seems perfectly suited to its environment.

In an extended conversation over coffee, the two talked about their success, their critics, their personal relationships and the importance of Telluride in their lives.

Although they have been categorized variously as prophets, gurus and futurists, they dismissed those labels in typical back-and-forth style:

Naisbitt: “I don’t like the word futurist. We’ve been more comfortable with social forecasters .”

Aburdene: “We (actually) describe the present. All we do is notice what is happening. It’s the world around us we are reflecting in these trends.”

Naisbitt: “We’re just a little ahead of the parade. Most people have a kind of intuitive sense of change going on, but don’t have the luxury of looking into it.”

Aburdene: “We’ve done tons of research--we read everything and distill every bit of information. ‘Megatrends 2000’ has 50 pages of end notes. I have a master’s degree in library and information science and I am devoted to being somewhat precise.”

Naisbitt: “Our approach has to do with the notion that change starts locally, from the bottom up. That’s why newspapers are so important to us: No one else comes closer to chronicling what is happening. We don’t watch TV for information: network news is disinformation. There is a mind-set (there) that only bad news is news. We’re much more optimistic than that.”

Aburdene: “Optimism empowers people. That thing that bothers me most about negativity--the idea that the world is going to hell in a hand basket--is that it provides the perfect excuse for not doing anything. It’s a cop-out.”

The celebrated Naisbitt-Aburdene optimism is not universally admired. Their facility for synthesizing and simplifying often fails to impress intellectuals, critical of sweeping statements (“To put it mildly, they are exaggerations,” said National Journal writer Neal Peirce) and accessible prose.

And on this particular day, Time magazine had just appeared with a full-page review of “Megatrends 2000” that, in part, described the authors as “21st Century ecstatics,” whose “relentlessly affirmative message” about the coming millennium had the “adolescent confidence” of a high school valedictory address.

Although the review was particularly harsh, the reaction was philosophical. “I was angry at first, but I believe in a free press,” said Naisbitt in response. “We have no control over that and we have to attend to our own integrity. That’s all we can do.”

And, he pointed out, the new book is already finding its admirers. Naisbitt produced a copy of a promotional newspaper ad, being prepared by the publisher, with all-out enthusiastic comments from 23 of the country’s prominent thinkers--from Norman Lear to Malcolm Forbes. Peter Sellars, director of the Los Angeles Festival, calls the book “A decathlon of optimism . . . makes you want to get up in the morning, go out there, and ride that wave!”

“This is my favorite quote,” noted Naisbitt, reading: “It’s a nice antidote to Time magazine.”

And while emphasizing the importance of a favorable book launch in a world brimming with new publications, he added, “In the long run, the book will come to stand for however useful it is for people.”

Naisbitt and Aburdene say that making information useful is their ongoing goal. In service of that objective, statistics, definitions and aphorisms leap from the pages of their book:

“Running out of information is not a problem, but drowning in it is.” . . . “It is not by chance that the United States has 188 Nobel prize-winners and Japan has five” . . . “For the last two decades, U. S. women have taken two-thirds of the millions of new jobs created in the information era . . . “

“Megatrends 2000” looks at the 1990s and sees a new world as the Cold War ends, the arms race slows, and, in an emerging era of globalization, the arts flourish; there is an international call to environmentalism, and communist countries are experimenting with the market mechanisms of capitalism. These are all empowering messages, they believe, for a society dominated by media doomsayers.

Which is not the criticism it might seem. “The people reporting the bad news are doing their job,” they write. “We respect them for it. Our mission is a different one. Because the problems of the world get so much attention, we, for the most part, point out information and circumstances that describe the world trends leading to opportunities.”

It would be difficult not to be optimistic in the sparkling sanctuary of Telluride’s bright blue sky and awesome mountains. Said Naisbitt: “The more we travel, the more vision of this world keeps us going.”

The resort was a special place even before they moved there, said Naisbitt, who had been coming to the Telluride Film Festival for years. (Their marriage in 1981 was the second for both).

“The first trip Patricia and I took together was here, for the film festival,” he recalled. “I didn’t tell her where we were going, just said to take jeans and dress warmly.”

But it wasn’t until 1984 that they chose it as their home. Living in Washington, caught up in the frenzy over the success of “Megatrends,” lecturing full time and working on their second book, they had even decided to skip the film festival that year because their schedules had become so hectic.

That’s when they decided to take their own advice about acknowledging change and transforming their own lives.

“We went to a restaurant and started talking about how we were living,” Naisbitt said. “We realized we were ricocheting around the world--we had a house in Washington, but we didn’t know our neighbors. That’s when we blew the whistle on all that travel. We decided to come here and buy a house. So many people move here, seeking community. It’s like an extended family.”

They now spend the summers and winters in Telluride, and travel the lecture-consultant-seminar circuits in spring and fall. This quarter-on, quarter-off pace suits them nicely and reflects their own advice in “Megatrends” that “we must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature.”

“There was another crucial element in our decision to live here,” added Aburdene. “It’s the extent to which, in the post-industrial age of communications, people don’t have to show up at a workplace. I work closely with an assistant who lives in Washington. The number of people who do this--who are no longer location bound--is just exploding.”

In Telluride, they say, they are engaged in the life of the town, serving on civic boards, sponsoring a party for the film festival, and, creating the Telluride Institute--a nonprofit foundation that has sponsored five Ideas Festivals and that Aburdene calls a “participatory, nonelitist version of the Aspen Institute.”

Festival themes have ranged from global issues (with guests from the Soviet Union) to the nitty-gritty problem of affordable housing in Telluride’s booming real estate market. “We’re devoted to the idea that if you work in Telluride, you should be able to live here,” said Aburdene. “So we brought in an expert who has studied the specific problem of ski resort housing, and gave us an encyclopedia of alternatives.”

But civic activities (which in Telluride can include skiing) have to accommodate the work schedule that their lives focus on: Trend forecasting is almost a spiritual calling.

Naisbitt was quoted in 1983 as saying, “I’m so convinced that our great hope for world peace is the global economy that I would really like to devote a lot of time to that and take some responsibility for it.” That continues to be a driving philosophy for the two. They’ve been described as New Agers, stemming from such interests as global unity, corporate networking and the importance of achieving human potential, but they sidestep the label.

“It’s difficult to live with a label that can be minimized, or trivialized,” commented Aburdene. “When we met in 1978, there were a lot of interesting and exciting programs about human potential--that’s the basis of the New Age movement and John and I both believe in the possibilities of the individual.

“But since 1981 we’ve been doing our own thing.”

That means an intensely personal focus on their research and writing, and a rigorous work schedule. Both are early risers who find mornings to be “sacred and uninterruptable” for reading and writing, although Naisbitt also “gets on the phone in the mornings, when we’re not writing a book.”

Although their house includes a large dormitory for guests (Naisbitt has five grown children by his previous marriage to Noel Senior), except for holidays and a “few weeks of the year for company,” they are alone, said Aburdene. “That’s why we can have our office overlooking the living room here, instead of all walled up.”

They take an hour’s walk (up the hill to the mine and back) every day, said Aburdene. “I find that walking together, out in this beautiful country, is a very congenial thing. We have interesting talks. You can stick a pen in your pocket, and, if you get an idea, you can stop and jot things down. You can’t do that when you’re running.”

Naisbitt, who has been a runner for 20 years, also has a treadmill in the downstairs dormitory. “In the winter I get on that and watch all the cable channels.”

Research is a constant part of their routine, he added. “We continue to follow what we’ve been writing about: We keep an update file for the soft-cover edition of the book.”

They do not agree with criticism that their “trends” are simplistic. “I have years and years of experience in trying to figure out what’s going on in the world,” said Naisbitt, who declared bankruptcy at one point in his career. “It takes a lot of failures and time, until you really get almost a sixth sense, or hone the senses you have.”

“Megatrends” grew out of Naisbitt’s successful Trend Report, a prestigious newsletter that, for an annual subscription fee of $15,000, informed corporate clients about cutting-edge developments.

Although he no longer owns the newsletter, Naisbitt still uses the techniques that made it successful. Their approach to work, says his wife, is “very simplistic. At first, we just sort through ideas. We take a dozen newspapers and hundreds of magazines, and John is there with his scissors every day, clipping. We also have a researcher who works in Washington and can follow up on any subject we need. We also get information from a network of people around the world. John tends to be intuitive; he will give information an initial scan and make a preliminary hypothesis. In a way, I take over and say can this be proved or not proved.”

But their work is not just a matter of shuffling information around, she added: “The other dimension we bring to this is travel and getting to know things firsthand.”

They view the coming decade with something like exuberance. “On the threshold of the millennium, long the symbol of humanity’s golden age,” their book concludes, “we possess the tools and the capacity to build utopia here and now.”

And if that sounds naive, in the face of drug wars and AIDS and poverty and the ozone layer, they resolutely see the glass as half full.

Said Naisbitt: “The history of civilization is that things get better. That’s the larger picture. People ask how we can be optimistic when a fourth of the world’s population is in poverty. Well, 100 years ago, 95% of the world’s population was in poverty. If what’s happening in Eastern Europe today--with people going from tyranny to democracy--can’t be viewed optimistically, what the hell can?”

MEGATRENDS REVISITED

In “Megatrends,” published in 1982, John Naisbitt examined the 10 major patterns of change he said America could expect in the 1980s. Eight years later, he insists “these shifts are continuing pretty much on schedule.” At home in Telluride recently, he examined his trends list and offered these observations:

THE TREND--We are shifting from an industrial society to one based on the creation and distribution of information.

THE UPDATE--”While the proportion of blue-collar jobs decreased from 19.5% to 15.5% in the last decade, more than 90% of the new jobs being created today are in the information sector.”

THE TREND--We are moving from a national economy to a world economy.

THE UPDATE--”World trade has been increasing at 10% a year, and the upcoming emergence of single-market Europe is but a step to a single-market world.”

THE TREND--We are moving in the dual directions of high-tech, high-touch, matching each new technology with a compensatory human response.

THE UPDATE--”Despite the explosion in sales of high-tech VCRs, people didn’t abandon the ‘high-touch’ experience of going to movies. The industry peaked with a record-breaking summer of 1989 at the box office.”

THE TREND--We are restructuring from a society run by short-term considerations and rewards in favor of dealing with things in much longer-term time frames.

THE UPDATE--”The tremendous concentration of economic and job growth in the 1980s has been in small entrepreneurial companies with long-range vision, versus the Fortune 500 companies who are short-term driven and whose total labor force has been shrinking throughout the decade.”

THE TREND--We are shifting from centralization to decentralization in politics, business and culture.

THE UPDATE--”In our offices we have moved from utilization of mainframe computers to the widespread presence of the personal computer.”

THE TREND--We are shifting from institutional help to more self-reliance in many aspects of our lives.

THE UPDATE--”The number of self-help groups continues to grow, as men and women call upon their own resources in everything from the burgeoning ACA (Adult Children of Alcoholics) meetings to Mothers Against Drunk Drivers and neighborhood watch groups.”

THE TREND--We are moving from representative democracy to participatory democracy.

THE UPDATE--”The proliferation of citizen-inspired ballot initiatives and referendums on Election Day has been a phenomenon of the 1980s, with California in the lead.”

THE TREND--We are giving up our dependence on hierarchical structures in favor of informal networks.

THE UPDATE--”Networking was the buzzword of the 1980s, affixed to formal and informal groups of all kinds, as well as newsletter and computer groups that connected members on a horizontal level.”

THE TREND--We are moving from the industrial cities of the Northeast to the South and West.

THE UPDATE--”Between 1980 and 1988, in a Sun Belt explosion, Florida’s population gained by 26.6%, Texas by 18.4% and California by 19.6%.”

THE TREND--From a narrow either-or society, with a limited range of personal choices, we are exploding into a multiple-option society.

THE UPDATE--”Only a few years ago, television viewers had their choice of three major (and similar) networks. Today cable television watchers can choose from up to 80 channels of programming.”

MEGATRENDS 2000

In “Megatrends 2000,” John Naisbitt and Patricia Aburdene present these trends as major influences in our lives during the 1990s:

* The Global Economic Boom of the 1990s: Contrary to popular doomsaying scenarios, we are bound for a period of unprecedented prosperity.

* A Renaissance in the Arts: The arts will permeate mass culture as never before, replacing sports as our dominant leisure activity.

* The Emergence of Free-Market Socialism: From the turmoil in the Eastern Bloc will spring a new and unprecedented economic and political ideology.

* Global Life Styles and Cultural Nationalism: Big Macs and Esprit sportswear may be ubiquitous, but the growing similarity of life styles around the world is producing a backlash against uniformity and a desire to assert the uniqueness of one’s culture and language.

* The Privatization of the Welfare State: The burning social question of the ‘90s will be how to help the poor without bankrupting the national treasuries. From the Third World to the West, the shift from government control to private enterprise is the first step.

* The Rise of the Pacific Rim: The focus of the world economy will shift from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with America’s West Coast states as well positioned as Tokyo.

* The Decade of Women in Leadership: Well-suited to the new humanistic requirements of institutional leadership, women have reached a critical mass in the white-collar professions and will attain leadership positions in significant numbers.

* The Age of Biology: Biotechnology will provoke the greatest ethical and intellectual debates since the days of Darwin.

* Religious Revival of the Third Millennium: Although the ways of seeking it will differ, from fundamentalism to New Age, spirituality will play an ever-expanding role as the millennium approaches.

* Triumph of the Individual: A new regard for individual achievement and integrity will underlie global changes. Telecommunications will liberate creative and self-employed people to live and work in quality-of-life locales.