Predictions will be wrong - AdAge 1980 proves it.

I recently found an old special edition of Advertising Age from 1980, about "the next 20 years." Knowing how much the world of advertising has indeed changed, I started reading it. Of course, it was so completely off target, that it was funny. The past is an awful predictor of the future, but we keep projecting in a straight line and trying it. It assumed the same limited media world, relying on more accurate audience measurement to target consumers. It did not conceive of the Internet, even though it had started by then. Interestingly, none of the writers seemed to be aware of any of the potentially disruptive technology which was even then on the horizon. I would speculate that this is still true today, and much of what really will change the world is not being considered today.

The fact is that ARPA started on the early Internet under Eisenhower. CompuServe was started in 1969, with email starting in 1978, chat in 1980 and file exhange in 1981. Yet no one foresaw in 1980 that this could be an advertising medium.

One generation has resulted in huge change

I recently came across a book which I had bought 25 years ago when I was promoted to a General Management position. This book gave much of the same advice which "onboarding" experts these days, such as PrimeGenesis, provide. However, there was one key difference. These days we knwo that the first 60 to 90 days are the crucial ones. A generation ago, we had more time. While today's books talk about the first 100 days or first 90, the book from 1981, is titled "Shooting the Executive Rapids - The First Crucial Year of a New Assignment."

These days, we live in an accelerated world. Today, we regard multi-tasking as normal. Snap judgements as essential. Yet human physiology and psychology has not changed in the past 50 years. So each time we acccelerate some work or increase the load, something suffers. We do something less well. Research tells us that we sleep too little, more sleep improves our thinking processes, yet we take pride in how little sleep we get. We do more things less well, but will not admit it to anyone for fear of being seen as weak or old.

We do not seem to learn to talk to our enemies

We should know by now that if you want to make peace, you have to talk to your enemies. Talking only to your friends does no good. If when you first talk to your enemies, they attack back, you have to continue to talk. Defend yes, but not attack back. After several hundred years, Britain learned this in dealing with the IRA, and Spain with ETA. The IRA looked a lot like Hezbollah - with a military wing and a "political" wing which had elected representatives in Parliament. However, in spite of continued attacks, the talking went on. The progress versus these two groups shows that you can negotiate with terrorists, and even slowly absorb them into society. The Negotiation Program at Harvard law school has taught this for many years, and the process has been shown to work. Yet our instincts, when attacked are to strike back harder. This simply creates more polarization and more terrorists.

I am confident in predicting that as long as people think you can crush terrorism militarily, it will not happen. No terrorist group in history has ever been crushed by force. Of course in 1916 the USA invaded Mexico to "punish" Pancho Villa, who had attacked Americans in the USA. The end result was that the USA retreated in complete failure several months later.

How is it possible to have an International business?

It may be a miracle that companies succeed in having prosperous international businesses. After all, the company is going to a country where the language, culture, and physical circumstances are very different. It should not surprise us that most companies international operations struggle for quite a while. Some even give up, others never reach the level of performance the home operation does. Most companies underestimate the challenges. For example, it is known that most people assume much greater homogeneity in groups to which they do not belong. So if you are a Harvard alumnus, you know there is wide variety among alumni, but someone who is not will feel comfortable generalizing about Harvard alumni. Americans will generalize about the French, while the French will generalize about Americans. So we are poor at understanding the subtleties of foreign cultures.

Equally, living in a place is very different from visiting there, however often. Even withn a country, living in LA is not the same visiting, and visting Mumbai is not the same as living there.

Hubris - yet again GM will drag down a fabled boss

I will predict absolutely that Carlos Ghosn will not fully grasp his own limits. Further, if he does succeed in creating a "merger" of Renault, Nissan and GM, it will drag all three down. Size alone is not a problem, but when size is created by merging entities with different cultures and histories, it becomes a drag. Since neither Nissan or Renault is fully out of the woods yet, and GM is deep inside, the sum of the parts is a very weakened dinosaur.

None of us fully know what we do not know, or what we can't do. However, as we become more successful we believe that we can do anything. We underestimate the complexity of that which we do not know. We always think the other person's job or industry is easier than ours. As a result, when we take it on, we fail.

Which countries will lead the world in 2100?

So often these days, people say that China will lead the world much as the United States led it in 2000 and Great Britain in 1900. The only problem with this is that none of the previous leaders were obvious a century before. In 1900 in seemed that even if Britain would be overtaken, it could equally be by Germany or Brazil or even Japan.

We never seem to learn that predicting the future by projecting the past in a straight line is rarely accurate. So, if China is not the woeld leader, what country will?