John Naisbitt Quotes

Lawyers are like beavers: They get in the mainstream and damn it up.

Strategic planning is worthless - unless there is first a strategic vision.

In a world that is constantly changing, there is no one subject or set of subjects that will serve you for the foreseeable future, let alone for the rest of your life. The most important skill to acquire now is learning how to learn.

The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.

We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

The more high technology around us, the more the need for human touch...HighTech/High Touch. The principle symbolizes the need for balance between our physical and spiritual reality.

The new source of power is not money in the hands of a few, but information in the hands of many.

Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it.

If you have to be right, you put yourself in a hedged lane, but once you experience the power of not having to be right, you will feel like you are walking across open fields, the perspective wide and your feet free to take any turn.

Trends, like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they are going.

Whenever a new technology is introduced into society, there must be a counterbalancing human response - that is, high touch - or the technology is rejected... We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature.

The new leader is a facilitator, not an order giver.

We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource [Information] that is not only renewable, but self- generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.

In turbulent times, in times of great change, people head for the two extremes: fundamentalism and personal, spiritual experience...With no membership lists or even a coherent philosophy or dogma, it is difficult to define or measure the unorganized New Age movement. But in every major U.S. and European city, thousands who seek insight and personal growth cluster around a metaphysical bookstore, a spiritual teacher, or an education center.

The bigger the world economy, the more powerful its smallest player.

America is a bottom-up society, where new trends and ideas begin in cities and local communities...My colleagues and I have studied this great country by reading its newspapers. We have discovered that trends are generated from the bottom up.

Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.

The most reliable way to forecast the future is to try to understand the present.

In a culture of electronic violence, images that once caused us to empathize with the pain and trauma of another human being, excite a momentary adrenaline rush. To be numb to another's pain - to be acculturated to violence - is one of the worst consequences our technological advances. That indifference transfers from the screen, TV, film, Internet, and electronic games to our everyday lives.

...countries don't create economies. It is entrepreneurs and companies that create and revitalize economies. The role of the governments should be to create a nourishing environment for entrepreneurs and companies to flourish, not to get in the way of economic development.

In an information society, education is no mere amenity; it is the prime tool for growing people and profits.

Learning how to learn is the most precious thing we have in life.

The economic borderlines of our world will not be drawn between countries, but around Economic Domains. Along the twin paths of globalization and decentralization, the economic pieces of the future are being assembled in a new way. Not what is produced by a country or in a country will be of importance, but the production within global Economic Domains, measured as Gross Domain Products. The global market demands a global sharing of talent. The consequence is Mass Customization of Talent and education as the number one economic priority for all countries

In turbulent times, in times of great change, people head for the two extremes: fundamentalism and personal, spiritual experience.

Think globally, act locally, think tribally, act universally.

The future is embedded in the present.

It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.

We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human race.

We are shifting from a managerial society to an entrepreneurial society.

One of the best kept secrets in America is that people are aching to make a commitment, if they only had the freedom and environment in which to do so.

I was totally surprised by the spread of the legalization of same-sex marriage. In just my lifetime we have gone from a taboo to even talk about homosexuality, to the sanction by governments of homosexual marriage. Few such large social considerations have ever before been turned over in such a short time.

The big-business mergers and the big-labour mergers have the appearance of dinosaurs mating.

The most important skill to acquire now is learning how to learn.

Almost all change is evolutionary, not revolutionary... expectations always travel at higher speeds.

Value is what people are willing to pay for it.

Globalization is a bottom-up phenomenon with all actions initiated by milions of individuals, the sum total of which is globalization. No one is in charge, and no one can anticipate what the sum of all the individual initiatives will be before the result manifest. A global economy can only be the result of spontaneous order.

In sales, as in medicine, a prescription before diagnosis is a mistake in the arts.

In their search for quality, people seem to be looking for permanency in a time of change.

The more technology we introduce into society, the more people will aggregate, will want to be with other people: movies, rock concerts, shopping.

Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it; what is happening in America is that those parades are getting smaller and smaller - and there are many more of them.

Small business, right down to the individual can beat big, bureaucratic companies ten times out of ten.