Seeing ahead good business

By JULIE MIDDLETON

They predict the future of corporate life, but you won't find a crystal ball or tarot card anywhere near them.

Americans Roger Herman and Joyce Gioia, partners in life and business, are futurists - people who devour overwhelming piles of information and marry their research skills and nose for trends to meld predictions for the future.

In an increasingly fast-paced world, the work of people like Herman and Gioia - analysts, not market researchers - has become crucial for corporates wanting to get ahead of the game and stay there.

Indeed, Gioia, a petite 54-year-old, quotes Canadian hockey great Wayne Gretzky to sum up why American corporates spend megabucks for futurists' services: "I don't skate to where the puck is. I skate to where the puck is going to be."

The World Future Society, to which both belong, has more than 30,000 members worldwide and lists more than 1400 future consultancies in its directory.

"In an anxious world, it's a field moving very big money.

The couple also issue a free trend alert each week, which they say goes to more than 20,000 subscribers in 52 countries.

One of their latest, headed Travel Will Change, predicts a move by businesspeople to corporate or leased planes and railways after what Americans have dubbed "9/11".

Herman and Gioia - who have seven mostly adult children between them and live in North Carolina - say that days after that tragedy, they predicted a spike in birth rates nine months on as people clung to home and family.

But that one isn't among the predictions archived on the site. Proof, of course, comes your way next June.

Some of the predictions on the web tend to elicit, at first glance, a "so what?" reaction.

They appear believable, not-too-radical, commonsense - which belies the fact that the seemingly small societal shifts they describe corral large numbers of people, effecting wholesale shifts in the way we live.

Herman, 58, a special agent during the Vietnam era, and Gioia are also acknowledged staff-retention experts in the US - their books include Keeping Good People (1990), Lean and Meaningful (1998) and How to Become an Employer of Choice (2000).

The couple were in Auckland last week on an Executive Events speaking engagement and to attend a gathering of other upbeat, inspirational types - the second annual conference of New Zealand's National Speakers Association.

While here they made a few predictions about how we will work in the future.

Retirement will be abolished

Gioia: "We are forecasting the end of retirement as it has been known. What we are seeing is that in the future people will work for eight or 10 years and then take a year off.

"In that year they may finish a degree, have a child, they may build a house, or travel.

"When that year is up, they will come back to work ready to achieve something exciting ... and be productive again. They'll work for another eight to 10 years and take another sabbatical."

Herman: "The mid-career retirements give people the opportunity to balance their lives with other kinds of experiences. It's being done now - Americans and Europeans are doing them."

Today's teenagers will drive tomorrow's corporate culture

Herman: "Watch what they are doing when they get home from school: they're going to the computer and playing strategic games.

"It's fast reaction - the hand-eye coordination comes after the mental agility. If you have a whole generation of people accustomed to solving problems very quickly and multi-tasking, they're going to have no patience.

"Managers are going to have to be a lot more responsive. Things are going to be moving a lot faster and you can't micro-manage somebody like that.

"Teenagers are playing interactive games with other people who are all over the world. These young people are interacting on an ongoing basis with kids from all these other countries.

"What does that say about how important geo-political boundaries are going to be? What will that do to change the way our world operates?"

"Informalisation" the new culture

Herman: "The corporate world of the future is going to be much more informal. What we see coming is an informalisation - that's been initiated by the movement towards casual dress.

"It's a relaxing of status symbols. People don't necessarily have a higher position, but rather a different role to play, which may include supervision of other people's work.

"We will have more of a collaborative relationship rather than an authoritarian relationship."

"People are more comfortable talking with each other. There are fewer status barriers. People are much more productive when they don't have status things getting in the way."

The team is dead, long live the team

Herman: "There's a major shift from the way it's been done. We started with authoritarian, then to scientific, management, then participative leadership and team leadership.

"Now we see it going to an individualised relationship, which we call facilitative leadership.

Gioia: "The 'millennials' and generation X are young people who did not have moms at home so [were unsupervised and self-sufficient].

"Now, in the workplace, they're saying: teams? I'm an individual, treat me like a unique and special person.

"That's why managers must treat each as individuals because they are now saying, in reaction to this whole team thing, I don't want somebody else to get credit for all of my hard work!"

Herman: "It's not a negative selfishness ... It's more self-interested ... self-accountability."

Executive Events

The World Future Society

The Herman Group