Five Ideas That Matter

The Harvard Business Review this month has a couple of sections on trends in an issue devoted to the new world business order.

One of our obsessions on fiveideas is/will be to collect and collate trends from elsewhere. These are interesting because the HBR headlines themas 10 Trends You Have To Watch. The authors  (Eric Beinhocker, Ian Davis, and Lenny Mendonca) all work with McKinsey Global Institute.

The trends are:

• Globalisation under fire
• Resources under strain
• Trust in business running out
• Management science under question as data models prove unequal to the task in banking
• Shifting consumption patterns
• A bigger role for Government
• Asia rising
• Leading companies reshaping their industries during recession
• Innovation having less momentum
• Price stability under threat.

The observation I want to make about the list is its eclectic quality. I think there are far more profound forces at work and I think these trends are not supported by good data but that anyway is often the case with trend forecasting. It’s the eclectic nature I believe diffuses the focus.

Which of these trends is a result of recession, which are contributories to recession and which are not really related to recession? And are any of them as significant as, for example, the tendency of the web to create irrational markets? Now that is a permanent feature of human activity that we haven’t begun to understand.

A stalled commitment to innovation on the other hand is a very temporary phenomenon and could hardly be called, convincingly, a widespread trend.  Falling trust in business – is it temporary or permanent and if so what are the consequences? A larger role for Government, equally.

We need trend analysis that uncovers new developments so the list leaves me wanting a debate with the authors to uncover what is new. Where can I do that? Here at landscape.hbr.org I’m going there now.