What is your image of the future?
Glen Hiemstra, founder and CEO of Futurist.com, says an individual, company or institution’s view of the road ahead is directly related to their own strategy for success.

“If you don’t develop a strategy, you become part of someone else’s,” says Hiemstra. “The future is not what happens to you. The future is something that you do.”

Hiemstra should know. He’s been analyzing the future for more than 20 years and is frequently cited as a resource for news articles about his favorite subject in prestigious publications such as The Wall Street Journal, U.S. News and World Report, and the Los Angeles Times.

Hiemstra was the keynote speaker at a recent Northwest Venture Capital Group breakfast in Bellevue. The gathering included representatives of the Kitsap Regional Economic Development Council, Karalyn Cleat, a small Bainbridge manufacturer of innovative boat cleats and Auto Credit Acceptance Credit Ltd., a Silverdale company that has developed a technology to process auto loans on line.

Hiemstra said in spite of great intentions, even great corporations sometimes lose their way. He pointed to IBM, Sears and General Motors, which in the 1960’s were considered the best managed companies in history. Three decades later, Fortune Magazine was wondering aloud on its cover whether these same three industrial giants hadn’t morphed into corporate dinosaurs.

A visiting scholar with the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington and frequently quoted speaker, consultant and author, Hiemstra, who lives in Kirkland, provided a glimpse of the next decade and follows other forecasters’ beliefs that the global economy will indeed double between 1995-2005:

He said three key factors are driving this expansion:

1) Efficiencies and productivity in manufacturing and business systems;
2) The emergence of true global markets; and,
3) The so-called “spending wave” of Baby Boomers between the ages of 42 and 50.
Hiemstra said historic data suggests that people in this age bracket, especially if they have children, buy more homes, cars, appliances, clothes and other consumer items than in any other time in their lives.

And, he noted, the largest chunk of the Baby Boom generation, those born between 1958-64, is just entering that period.

“Since the consumer economy drives the U.S. economy and the U.S. economy drives the global economy, the next 10 years look pretty good,” he predicted.
As a quick aside, Hiemstra noted that the stock market’s recent retreat from Internet stocks was precipitated as much by Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan’s misunderstanding of the New Economy and the Justice Department’s attacks on Microsoft as the “irrational exuberance” and “nothing can fail” strategies that buoyed Wall Street investors.

“We won’t see the market bubble like we have (possibly in our lifetime), but we will see (Internet) companies doing business, led by real people who are willing to stick around.”

As for the Internet, Hiemstra said the key number to think of is “4.” The reason? Only 4 percent of the world’s population is on the Internet; some day that number will be 80 percent, he suggests.

Looking out to 2025 and beyond, Hiemstra forecasts some fascinating trends worth watching. For example, anti-aging drugs and cures will radically extend life; we will live in a true data flow culture (information will come at us from chairs, walls, ceilings, floors and devices); “biogenics” will be part of life (selected characteristics, cloned organs, gene cures, etc.); anti-gravity devices will appear; true cyber life will exist; and the beginnings of time travel will be explored.

“Over the next 20 years (technology and innovation-wise), popcorn will be popping everywhere,” Hiemstra says. “All devices will be combined into a single global computer ... translating into the biggest electrical engineering project in the world.”

For more information on Hiemstra, check out the Northwest Venture Capital Group web site at: www.nwvg.org or the Futurist.com.