“The Next Boom: What You Absolutely, Positively Have to Know about the World Between Now and 2025” by Jack Plunkett (BizExecs Press, $29.99).
By 2025, the U.S. population, spurred by a positive birth rate and an influx of immigrants, will add 40 million people. That’s millions of new workers and consumers. Today’s younger workers, remembering the recession of 2007-2010, will not take their financial futures for granted. They learned the painful lesson of “keeping up with the Joneses.” Their older counterparts, who saw their retirement savings slashed and faced with the uncertainty of Social Security, will remain in the workforce longer.
World trade will triple to $27 trillion — that’s a global economy. In order to compete for worldwide consumers, the U.S. must put a premium on higher education, continuous workforce development and entrepreneurship. Why? Brain power will do the future’s heavy economic lifting. Growing economies — like those of India, Brazil and China — also produce engineers, scientists, business managers/executives and entrepreneurs. They’ll develop and flex financial muscle, too.
And don’t forget about emerging markets in Africa and Southeast Asia. Their standards of living are climbing. Their rise offers opportunity for providers of goods and services.
The Internet will play a global role, too. Small business will no longer mean just local business. Entrepreneurs can reach consumers across borders with a few mouse clicks. Business collaboration should increase, too, as sharing information in “the cloud” becomes more prevalent.
Plunkett foresees an emphasis on biotech and nanotech. Both offer “smaller, faster, better, cheaper” alternatives to solving problems with rising healthcare costs, food production and energy conservation. Natural gas — not solar, wind or biofuels — will play the integral role in energy, too. The U.S. has it in abundance. Not only is it cheap, efficient and clean, it doesn’t require expensive, ever-growing taxpayer subsidies to support its use.
Forever an optimist, Plunkett paints a vibrant picture of what will be. At the same time, he challenges our government, institutions and businesses to make it happen.
“The Triangle of Truth — The Surprisingly Simple Secret to Resolve Conflicts Large and Small” by Lisa Earle McLeod (Perigree, $13.95).
From a conflict resolution standpoint, most people think of compromising. The problem with compromise: It never produces the optimal solution. “I give a little; you give a little” thinking accepts a middle ground. Think in terms of a pie. With compromise, each party gets a piece of the pie — but not half a pie each. That means there’s still a piece on the table that goes uneaten.
McLeod’s solution to conflicts deals with merging truths and aiming for “what’s best,” not defending a position. In business, that solution sets aside emotions, turf wars and office politics to produce the optimal organizational solution. Her “triangle of truth”: The base angles are “my truth” and “your truth;” the apex angle is the “higher-level solution.”
To reach that solution, McLeod offers “Yes, AND” thinking as the productive alternative to either-or, “Yes, BUT” thinking. Embracing the “AND” leads to working together to reconcile different perspectives by focusing on HOW things might work. It encourages a ‘what-if’ partnership that explores alternatives hidden in plain sight.
To get to “Yes, AND,” you need to learn about the perspectives of others. While you can glean information from what you know, you need to learn more about what you don’t know. That means you have to create open dialogue and show your willingness to listen. “Who’s more powerful, the person that only knows what they think? Or the person that knows what they think, and what the other guy thinks?”
The triangle of truth allows an organization to reach same-page decisions faster with buy-in guaranteed.
Jim Pawlak is a nationally syndicated book reviewer.
