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Executive Times |
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2007 Book Reviews |
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Mind Set!
Reset Your Thinking and See the Future by John Naisbitt |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click on
title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Surprises Something you’ll
read on the pages of John Naisbitt’s latest book, Mind Set!
Reset Your Thinking and See the Future, will surprise you. There’s some
factoid you didn’t know that may have a profound impact on you and your
organization. For those who have read Naisbitt for the past quarter century,
there will be some déjà vu moments on these pages, and I felt some tiredness
when I thought he was plowing over old ground one too many times. Despite
that shortcoming, the potential to be surprised remains, and that make make Mind Set
worth reading. Here’s an excerpt, all of the chapter titled, “Mindset #7:
Resistance to change falls if benefits are real,” pp. 57-61: Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité ou la mort! Réglage, Egalisation, Bureaucratie ce la
rnort! “The European constitution
is perfect—although maybe a little less elegant than the Constitution of the
United States,” said Valery Giscard d’Estaing on April 20, 2005. On May 29,
the French people answered: “Non!” The
French, and a little later the Dutch, saw no benefit in a constitution
written for and by the political elite, 800 pages of regulations and old
treaty agreements that would make the European Union neither more transparent
nor easier to understand. The “elegant” American Constitution has 12 pages
and holds only principles, understandable for anyone. The political earthquake
that followed the French and Dutch rejections sent reverberations across
Europe. But the no-referenda, which were disasters for supporters of
constitutional change, opened a great opportunity for those who want a
constitution that serves the people of the 25 member countries of the
European Union, all of whom have to approve it. Not too
much has been moving in the European Union since then. More energy went into
defending the necessity of ratification instead of the need to change it. The
resistance of people will not fall until changes are made and benefits (if
there are any, which is still questionable) are apparent. The European Union
faces the challenge of responding to reasonable demands of people, like a
meaningful constitution, and of establishing understanding for economic
necessities such as cuts in unaffordable welfare programs. This is a
difficult responsibility for the European Union, which does not yet know who
it is and where it is going. More than
40 years ago, when the European Union was taking its first steps as the
European Economic Community, I would not have believed it if someone told me
that one day I would live in Europe. I was on my way to Asia to spend a year
in Thailand. It was in 1967, during my time with IBM, when I had my first big
experience of the importance of making benefits transparent before change
can be expected to be embraced. I was in Thailand to develop a project to
help accelerate agricultural development in the northeastern part of the
country. We tried to interest the farmers in the idea of planting a third
crop of rice and also planting other crops between the rows of established
crops. But the farmers resisted. They resisted—we found out later—for a very
good reason: They knew that their distribution infrastructure could not
handle such an increase in productivity. Once we solved the distribution
problem, they embraced the new ways of farming and the additional income that
resulted. Ever since
then, I have visited Asia several times each year, and I have always been
fascinated by the energy that the Asians, especially the Chinese, put into
proceeding against all odds and dealing with any change, as long as they were
sure of the benefits. During the Cultural Revolution, many left their country
and became a strong economic power as Overseas Chinese. They are now coming
back as they see the great opportunities returning to the homeland. While
Overseas Chinese add their financial and intellectual potential and
entrepreneurial verve to the Chinese talent pool, within China millions of
the rural population are seeking ways to get out of poverty. We got to know
two of them in Shanghai. The couple
Li Fong and Li Chuang grew up in a little village in central China. Li
Chuang’s father was a vegetable farmer, and from early in life young Li
worked with him on the farm as his grandfather and his great-grandfather had
done. When he married Li Fong, it seemed clear what was ahead of them. But
the talk of good work in big cities had found its way even into this remote
small village. Chuang began to speculate that with a better income he could
send his child to better schools, support his parents, and at the end,
improve life for all the family. The benefits seemed strong enough to fight
for permission to move to the city. Doris and
I got to know about Li Chuang several years ago during one of our stays in
Shanghai. We always
stay at the Portman Ritz-Carlton, not only because of the wonderful
hospitality we experience there but also because the hotel is next door to a
typical Chinese neighborhood. Old and new China meet within a few meters.
Adjacent to our five-star luxury accommodations, where some suites costs more
for one day than most Shanghainese earn in a year, are old town houses with
laundry hanging out of windows or simply hung on wires attached to trees or
streetlamps. (Every time we go to Shanghai, more of those houses have been
replaced by modern buildings with modern equipment.) Around the
corner from the hotel was a hut, a little stand where a couple was selling
fruits, snacks, and drinks. Behind the stand was something that looked like
an attached tent. We thought it might be a storage room. Doris was especially
interested in how the couple experienced the discrepancy between their stand
and Ferragamo and Louis Vuitton just 50 meters away. She asked Michelle Wan,
the marketing manager of the hotel, who over the years has became a friend of
ours, about the couple, and Michelle told us Li Chuang’s story. The Lis
had risked a big change in their lives. Their bet had been that in Shanghai,
where a vast amount of construction is going on, selling snacks and drinks
should be a good business. They built that little stand near the hotel, and
because construction in the neighborhood goes on around the clock and their
customers are mainly construction workers, their service is 24 hours a day.
What we thought was a storage tent was their home, where they take turns
sleeping. Such
conditions of living are upsetting to us, but we cannot make the mistake of
putting ourselves in their condition. Michelle assured us that they are quite
content; the steady stream of workmen coming and going generates enough
revenue to sustain them and their child living with their parents back in
their village, and a little leftover. Sometime near the end of 2005, Michelle
added, she had asked Li Chuang why she didn’t see his wife at the stall very
often anymore. He told her that she was running their second stall down the
road. When we were in Shanghai in July 2006, we bought some peaches at their
booth and we noticed that they did not sleep behind the stall anymore. In China
the eagerness for a share in the growing economic pie is driving people to
where the action is. What a difference from what I monitor in Europe. The
European mindset is upside down—benefits first, and then we’ll see. Instead
of moving to where the jobs are, many in Europe still expect jobs to come to
them, still believe that a job and a house are for a lifetime. I was upset
when I recently watched a TV discussion in which young Viennese said they
wouldn’t move to a job a hundred miles away. They would rather stay
unemployed, supported by the government. Fortunately,
those young Viennese don’t represent all Austrians or all Europeans. Europe
does stand for tradition and constancy, but that does not mean that
everything will stay the way it has been and that work and money will be
distributed as they have always been, bound to old ways of thinking. The
constancy is that we have to make our living, as employers or employees, and
the ones who embrace necessary change early on will benefit the most. Again,
sports can be taken as a model. Looking
back to the basketball example that I used in discussing the first Mindset,
“Most things remain constant’ the game stayed the same, but few would argue
for a stubborn resistance against Hank Luisetti’s new technique of one-hand
shooting when the benefits were so clear: winning with it versus losing with
the old way of two-handed shots. Nat Holman’s desperate statement, “If my
boys ever shot one-handed, I’d quit coaching,” was proved foolish. It was the
same after the introduction of the Fosbury flop, when Fosbury’s coach first
tried to get him to switch back to the straddle method. Dick Fosbury’s method
was a challenge to the conventional thinking, but it broke world records and
changed high jumping forever—or for as long as forever is in sports. In
sports, results define quickly the path to the future. In the
business world, change might sometimes take a little longer, but in the end
the market decides—just as it does in sports. There are,
of course, cases in which resistance to change is the result of stubbornness
or ignorance, but people who like to move on in life usually do not resist
change just because they can’t stand change. On the contrary, people usually
embrace change when they perceive that it is to their benefit. Mind Set
begins with Naisbitt’s foundation of eleven mindsets. Part 2 presents a
picture of the future in five dimensions. As with all prior Naisbitt books,
many readers will feel that they already know what he’s presenting as a
revelation. Mind Set
can be best appreciated when approached with the attitude that there is
something new here to discover. Steve Hopkins,
February 23, 2007 |
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·
2007 Hopkins and Company, LLC The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the March 2007
issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/Mind
Set.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • 723 North Kenilworth Avenue • Oak Park,
IL 60302 E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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