The 500-Year Delta*, excerpted here, is the work of former Yankelovich partners Watts Wacker, now resident forecaster at SRI Consulting, and Jim Taylor, director of global marketing at Gateway 2000. Equal parts deep demographic research and divining rod, this wide-ranging guide to "what happens after what comes next" spells out how convergence and accelerating rates of change have redefined the momentum of history. We have entered an era, in short, when chain reactions are governed not by the domino effect but by* Slinky theory*, a continuous expansion and contraction of social energies. Yet the shifting landscape of the future, like the increasingly competitive craft of futurism, demands more than a keen sense of historical cycles. In fact, an ear for idiom - and a knack for coining phrases - has become the currency of modern-day imagineering, whether you chase the hidden agendas of popular culture in the patois of street punks or trace the floor plan of the next civilization in the technobabble of Sand Hill Road. Looking backward, the true legacy of Naisbitt's* Megatrends or Toffler's Third Wave may turn out to be not the worldviews but the words. Mastering the new millennialist lexicon, it seems, is a primary thrival skill*; a phrase on everyone's lips - think* push - can quickly become the proverbial butterfly's wings. Wacker's coinages already have seeped into many neotribes of the new economy, worn in "wordrobes" from the backwaters of the Web to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. But use these words wisely: glossofacilia may be the quickest route to global pillory*.*
Age of Access The age we are already in, in which connectivity drives toward the access of everyone to everyone, everything to everything, and everything to everyone. The Age of Access impels new political and economic structures based on access, not scarcity. See connectivity.
Anthrolineage The résumé of cultural experience that allows one, in a time-compressed world, to immediately discover identity with a short-term other.
Bionomics Literally, the merger of biological and economic theory. In its more figurative sense, the merger of the world of the made and the world of the born. Bionomics will flourish as an academic discipline because as the two worlds merge, economic systems will assume the properties of biological ones.
Blue-chip ejaculation The tendency of very large companies when confronted with massive amounts of change to ejaculate a single-point answer in a very large way. See truncated perspective.
Capital quarks The subatomic structure of the elemental breeding matter of any business. Capital quarks come in four forms. Unruly quarks produce excessive governance, excessive streams of capital, or excessive expectations on the part of the capital market or supplier. Fluid quarks are capital that immediately engages and sustains progress. Venal quarks require the recipient organization to become like the capital source. Social quarks add social magnificence to the basic philosophical concept. See pagan capital.
Competitive uniphobia A fixation on competitive situations that by their very nature are transitory. See truncated perspective.
Complicated simplicity What's needed to survive and prosper in a chaos world in which reason no longer applies, in which you must focus on outcome, not process, and in which you must be, not do. "At the still point of the turning world.... there the dance is," T. S. Eliot wrote in Book I of his Four Quartets. "But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity."
Connectivity The result of the fusion of computing and communications. First posited by Nobel laureate Arno Penzias. See Age of Access.
Convergence The blending of culture and ideas into a single product.
Corporate communalism The tendency of executives within any corporation to group within their own think-sets, experience-sets, and product-sets. See truncated perspective.
Cryptocentrism The tendency of media communes, tribes, and other microcultures to invent language that maintains in-group/out-of-group distinctions. Technobabble, gang "signing," and graffiti "tagging" are all examples of cryptocentrism.
Cultural schizophrenia The modern condition born of a disconnection between attitudes and behaviors, between the world as it is presented and the world as we intuit it to be. Cultural schizophrenia occurs whenever society begins to reinvent its vision of how it will conduct affairs in the future.
Customer loyalty The new imperative of marketing. As the marketplace approaches a supersaturation of products - as the power in the marketing equation shifts from product to consumer - brand loyalty disappears. To survive, manufacturers and retailers will have to create unique loyalty relationships with their customers, one customer at a time. See marketing surplus.
Disharmonious conjunctions The organizing principle of a chaos world. Nothing can be planned. Nothing happens as part of a predictable chain of events. Decision making is driven by random convergences. See oxymoronic future.
Distention Not inattention, but the refusal to involve oneself in issues that have no relevance over one's life. A necessary survival skill in a chaos-driven world.
Diversity IQ A basic measure of the capacity to survive and prosper in the Age of Access. Diversity IQ is built on the ability to move freely and tolerantly among people of various races, cultures, backgrounds, and beliefs.
Downward nobility The decline in the value of formerly status-laden items and the simultaneous growth in the status value of just being satisfied. Self-affirmation will come by underspending incomes and exercising independence as consumers, not by depending upon objects to establish worth.
Ecomagnetics The creeping tendency of all products to move toward the central values in the culture.
Endotruths Truths known inside, but not outside a culture - whether it's a social, political, or economic organization, a tribe, or a media commune. Endotruths usually begin with the nature of the founder of the organization, and they explain why two companies in the same business often have startlingly different corporate cultures. See exotruths.
Evilution The transformation of evil from time to time and place to place and at differing rates of evolution, largely as determined by tribes and communes. For the Mother Jones media commune, Richard Nixon remains the embodiment of evil more than two decades after he resigned the presidency under the threat of impeachment. For the Republican cocktail-party circuit, Nixon has passed from victim to embarrassment to redemption to radiant political authority. See global pillory and media communalism.
Exotruths Presumed truths about a culture, whether they are in fact true or false. Exotruths are the myths that frame the social understanding of an organization. They determine its external value and cannot be disproved even by denying them. The exotruth of Coca-Cola is that the formula for Coke is kept in a safe deep in corporate headquarters; the endotruth (see above) is that virtually everybody who is anybody at Coca-Cola knows the formula by heart.
Fault tolerance The capacity of any organization to tolerate calamitous events. Fault tolerance increases in direct relation to an organization's ability to say "thank you" and "I'm sorry."
Filocity A capacity to come up to speed in alien cultures, to make cultural penetration and establish friendships. What Ferris Bueller had in such abundance in the movie named for him.
Flight impulse The tendency of everyone between the ages of 45 and 50 to seek a completely different lifestyle and actively plot their escape.
Fraternities of strangers Ad hoc affinity groups created for finite periods to achieve specific ends. The new basis for social organization. See tribal marketing.
Futopia Statements or ideas about how to live in the future that fail to make reference to or take into account the impending urban population explosion. All speculations about the future that do not factor in large urban crowds are futopic and, thus, futile.
Global pillory Thanks to global access, global connectivity, and global media saturation, global pillory is where you go when you are globally bad. Nearly a decade after he was brought low by the law and despite extensive efforts to raise money for research into prostate cancer, which he suffers from, Michael Milken remains in global pillory, both famous and ostracized.
Glossofacilia A tendency to use very large words to explain very small phenomena. Glossofacilia drives to complexify rather than simplify and is the natural instinct of reactionaries to an age of change.
Herd crimes Crimes that, once committed, are repeated communally, by everyone in the herd. Shoplifting is a herd crime of young teenagers; smoking marijuana was the herd crime of the counterculture of the late '60s and early '70s; padding expense accounts is the herd crime of junior executives.
Homophyly The tendency of objects, when in close proximity, to assume the characteristics of each other. Based on genetic theory, homophyly is equally applicable to human behavior. It increases in direct relation to the increase in access and connectivity. MTV, for example, has created a global homophyly of musical tastes among young people, just as television, in general, and VCRs have created a global homophyly in wants and desires. The ultimate extension of homophyly is a global biological similarity that will threaten genetic variation.
Inconspicuous consumption Defining simply your taste, not your life, by the items you consume. Part of the new economics built around individualism, not consumerism. See downward nobility.
Instant history Reinventions of history as a way of accounting for near term behavior. The marketing of golfer Tiger Woods as a racial icon and Microsoft's introduction of Windows 95 were both examples of instant history at work, but no example better captures the spirit of instant history than the annual NFL Super Bowl. As ex-running back Duane Thomas once put it, "If it's so super, how come they're having one next year?"
Intelligent disobedience What seeing-eye dogs are taught - essentially that they are to obey unless they have a better idea. Intelligent disobedience is already embedded in the corporate culture of companies like Microsoft. See unrules.
Latent personalization The unrealized capacity of a product or an idea to be taken personally. Clothing remains the highest per capita commodity expenditure among highly personalized products, but most products, from books to tractors, have a vast potential to be personalized. And in a world of splintering markets and individual realities, realizing latent personalization will become increasingly crucial to market success.
Loss followers Substantive investment in products, without a prospect of recovering the investment, in order to catch up. The extraordinary concession granted by the state of Alabama to attract a new Mercedes plant, the extraordinary expenditures undertaken by the city of Baltimore to attract the Cleveland Browns football team - rechristened the Baltimore Ravens - and Panasonic's heavy investment in a knockoff of the Sony Walkman are all examples of loss followers. In each case, the outlays were necessary to remain credible: as a state to relocate to, a city to invest in, an electronic product to consider purchasing.
Macronomia The tendency of large organizations to experience feelings of normlessness and disgust with their own size. Macronomia drives corporations like IBM to partition their parts and decentralize their structures. The cellularity and decentralization, in turn, threaten value continuity in the whole. See values-based management.
Marketing surplus A theory developed by McKinsey's David Court, which holds that success is determined not by market share, but by which one of the entities in any transaction - from raw-goods supplier through manufacturer, retailer, and consumer - holds the greatest amount of the surplus or profit made at each step of the process. As the market reaches saturation, marketing surplus moves to the consumer.
Media communalism An affinity group in which members selectively manipulate their media lives to reinforce a singular worldview or set of values. See truncated perspective.
Mediocracy The hierarchy formed within microcultures on the basis of media appreciation for the individuals that make up the microculture. New York's Reverend Al Sharpton, to cite one example, has no political base, but has been anointed by the media as the mediocrat for his microculture. Because mediocrats tend to know one another, they are how microcultures communicate with one another.
Mental flexibility The measure of a society's ability to accept change, and perhaps the largest single determinant of national macro-wealth in the future. A 1995 World Bank ranking of future economic potential, based in part on mental flexibility, placed Australia first in the world and the United States fifth.
Multiple yous The capacity to re-create yourself as the situation demands. John Wayne, strong and silent whether he played a cowboy or a soldier, was the paradigm of a loyalty-based world. Tom Hanks shifting from idiot-savant (Forrest Gump) to AIDS victim (Philadelphia) to hero (Apollo 13) is the personality paradigm of a deal-based world.
Nanostalgia The tendency to feel nostalgic over events, such as movies, that concluded only seconds ago. The $150-a-bottle Krug champagne, for example, celebrates in its advertisements its capacity to deliver nanostalgic moments. Instant history (see above) takes advantage of nanostalgia by providing the throttle for such moments. Super Bowl replays are nanostalgic moments in the midst of an instant-history happening.
Non-sense 1. What logic becomes as we cross the delta from reason to chaos. 2. The indefinable qualities of great brands that enable them to travel across and through time.
Nulture The convergence of nerds and culture, and a powerful, growing force as a majority of the population actively seeks to assimilate and apply advanced technology.
On the bubble As commonly used, a term of great respect. As it should be used, a term of great fear. To be "on the bubble" is to be so close to a trend that your future success is in imminent jeopardy. Why? Because trends move in ever more narrow bands, and the success you presently enjoy is likely to blind you to the changes you must embrace to succeed in the future. When you're on the bubble, it's time to blow your organization up.
Oxymoronic future A future formed by the infinite repetition of disharmonious conjunctions (see above).
Pagan capital Capital produced and delivered to a company with one set of values from a capital source with a different set of values. Whether in the form of direct investments or venture capital, pagan capital produces often huge dislocations in entrepreneurial companies, because the values that govern the capital are not commensurate with the values that created the success of the recipient organization. The great success of Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway is directly related to the fact that the capital it delivers is never pagan. See values-based management.
Particle economics The economic analog of particle physics, which concerns itself with matter so small that it lacks magnitude yet still exerts attraction and has inertia. A central discipline as capital becomes ever more frictionless, ownership disappears as a measure of wealth, and money comes to lack intrinsic meaning.
Permanent flexibility What all great companies and managers will have - the capacity to constantly remake themselves as different and randomly arising situations demand.
Privacy management Critical in the Age of Access and one of the next great growth sectors. As connectivity spreads, privacy management will become the ultimate status tool.
Real disguise Getting outside the box, adopting a disguise that allows you both to be yourself and to experience life or a situation from a different perspective. The standard work in the field remains John Howard Griffin's Black Like Me. See diversity IQ.
Shelf determinism The capacity of products to transform themselves on the shelf without any physical changes - a characteristic of all great global brands. Tide, to cite one example, takes on different meanings for differing cultures, but however the culture defines "clean," Tide is its standard of excellence.
Sisbertizing Named for the movie critics Siskel and Ebert, this is the process by which products and ideas are validated within particular microcultures by objective social critics anointed by the microculture to do so. Every microculture has its Sisberts, and it is crucial to appeal to them because, while advertising can create arousal among the microculture, only sisbertizing can create conviction.
Situal intimacy Intimacy based on proximity, not deep association. The annual Bohemian Grove gathering in California - an exercise in shared nudity among the rich and powerful - is an example of the creation of situal intimacy, as is the US Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island, South Carolina. Arthur Andersen institutionalized situal intimacy among its trainees by giving them free tickets and encouraging them to get drunk with each other. Situal intimacy can lead to situational love (see below).
Situational lifestyles Deal-based, not loyalty-based lifestyles.
Situational love Spasms of affection driven by circumstances that have no binding effect beyond the moment. The intensity of situational love grows in direct proportion to our incapacity to spend emotional capital in the course of our ordinary lives, and as the compression of time intersects with the acceleration of stress, the incapacity to spend such capital in the normal course of events grows exponentially. See situal intimacy.
Slinky theory A theory of social history based on the premise that at any given moment society, like a Slinky toy, is either contracting toward consensus or expanding toward the exploration of end points.
Thrival skills Skills that will allow individuals and businesses to not just survive but to thrive in the Age of Possibility.
Tribal marketing The creation of affinity groups for commercial ends. Perhaps the most notable and successful contemporary example is Harley Davidson, which has coupled the sale of motorcycles and peripherals to the creation of weekend motorcycle clubs and an entire way of life built around Harley-Davidson products. Tribal marketing works best when it is constantly reinforced with icons.
Truncated equilibrium The theory that evolution occurs not as a succession of regularly repeated peaks and valleys, but in huge forward leaps followed by long plateaus. We are currently in the midst of one such leap.
Truncated perspective What happens either individually or within corporations when communalism artificially limits the ability to see things whole.
Unrules A form of corporate discipline built on the premise that in a chaos world the company with the fewest rules wins.
Value stacking How generational values are transmitted. Each generation inherits a stack of values from its predecessors, and each value is subtly transformed as it is stacked and passed on. Value stacking is influenced by the acceleration in the rate of generational change.
Values-based management Management based not on objectives, but on a finite number of incontrovertible beliefs never subject to a proof test. In a chaos-based world in which objectives are constantly overwhelmed by variables, values-based management assures that decisions ultimately arrange themselves to serve the good of the whole.
Vectron An idea or product that pushes a company in a short-wave, relatively insignificant direction, yet is critical to the company's ability to operate on the bleeding fringe.
Wrebels Employees who stray from the inherent values of an organization and thus seek to wreck its value system. If wrebels are important enough, they are sent to global pillory (see above).
Xerophilia Not from the Greek root xero, meaning "dry," but from the company that turned its dry-copying procedure into a global trademark. The love of copying, and the ability of everything to be copied.
