Big business in seeing the future of business

Allison Linn Senior writer • Profile • E-mail

In the 1967 movie “The Graduate,” Dustin Hoffman’s floundering character is famously given just one word of advice for the future: “Plastics.”

If Paul Saffo were talking to a young college graduate today, he also might offer just one word of guidance: “Robots.”

And that person might want to pay attention. For the past 25 years, Saffo has been among the growing number of people who make a living telling big businesses, government leaders and others what the future may bring, and how they can take advantage of it.

There’s big business in trying to forecast the future — and, for many businesses, big consequences for being wrong. With corporations fretting about everything from hurricanes to whether high heels will sell this fall, some in the forecasting business say they are more in demand than ever.

“We happen to be living in a time of very rapid change, and I think any CEO or leader ... who’s really worth their salt is looking ahead,” said Kathi Vian, program director for the Institute for the Future’s 10-year forecast.

Forecasters _ several prefer to describe themselves that way, as opposed to the more loaded duty of "predicting" _ also say they are hearing from a wider group of executives and organizations seeking advice about the future. They include governments, nonprofits and industries that used to think such guidance was unneeded.

“It’s clearly a confusing world out there, (so) clearly there’s a big demand for people to make forecasts,” said Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, who occasionally makes forecasts himself.

Nariman Behravesh, chief economist with Global Insight, remembers how in the 1990s many high-tech companies seemed to see no use for his company’s economic forecasts. Then the tech industry crashed, surprising and devastating many companies.

“Now we have as many of our clients those technology firms, because they realized they’re not immune to the (economic) cycle,” he said.

These days, forecasting can run the gamut from trying to explain to a real estate group how global warming might affect sales in the coming decades to helping a computer maker evaluate how foreign currency fluctuations might impact business in the next few months.

Thanks to unforeseen but devastating events like the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and Hurricane Katrina, forecasters also are increasingly being asked to provide scenarios for the unexpected.

“They’re interested in the forecast ... but they also want to know, OK, how could things go wrong?” Behravesh said.

Another concern is how to react if things unexpectedly go right. Behravesh said forecasters have been guilty of missing pleasant surprises, such as the U.S. technology boom in the 1990s and the collapse of Communism in Eastern Europe, “because we couldn’t figure them out.”

There’s also a market for analysis that looks further into the future, offering up pie-in-the-sky ideas that could become everyday phenomena later on. (Remember, someone had that wacky idea about the Internet long before we were all posting home videos on YouTube.)

Saffo, a longtime technology forecaster who also teaches at Stanford University, believes that one of those big future trends is robots, who might one day drive your car and do other tasks.

James Canton, chief executive of the think tank Institute for Global Futures, thinks that in the future many of your belongings will have embedded information, allowing, for example, your various pieces of clothing to communicate with each other.

Of course, these prognosticators easily could be wrong. Anyone who’s been in the business long enough has come to experience that particular embarrassment — as well as the joy of getting something really right.

Mark Anderson, who runs the technology industry newsletter Strategic News Service, says he foresaw Apple Chief Executive Steve Jobs’ triumphant return to the computer maker he co-founded two years before it happened — perhaps before Jobs himself even envisioned it.

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