This isn’t your father’s capitalism. In millennial America, fifty percent of our demography may now be semi-literate sons and daughters of rock-and-roll. And if any of the Lords of the New Economy even have a literature of choice, we’d suspect it’s the stuff that Bill Gates and Paul Allen discussed in high school: their favorite science-fiction novels. So it’s no surprise, you might argue, that some of today’s big corporate honchos like to employ think-tanks of professional futurists to contemplate far-out scenarios their companies might face—for such movers and shakers, that’s like an afternoon of “Quake” or “SimWorld” would be for the rest of us.

You might argue that. The reality is that, unlike politicians, corporate managers can’t simply rely on ideology and issue edicts like, “the proletariat, having centralized all instruments of production in the hands of the State, is increasing the total of productive forces.” Business people—even Jeff Bezos—must show a profit or eventually they won’t be in business. So their need to prepare for possible futures is quite pragmatic. And for some time now, there have been people seriously trying to develop methodologies which provide some kind of handle on the futures businesses might have to face.

How effective have these methodologies become? Quite effective. In the late 1980s, the Soviet imperium began fracturing. CIA Kremlinologists, who’d cast the Russkis as America’s main threat for the next thirty years, couldn’t predict events—according Colin Powell's memoirs—“much better than a layman watching television.” Yet as far back as 1983 oil multinational Royal Dutch/Shell’s Group Planning team, recognizing the Soviet Union as a potential competitor in the European gas market, had constructed scenarios extrapolating the Soviet system’s imminent breakdown and had identified Mikhail Gorbachev—then a fairly obscure cog in the Soviet machine—as the man to watch.

Led initially by Pierre Wack—a charismatic Frenchman who liked burning incense in his office while he delivered cryptic epigrams to his acolytes—Shell’s planners had in fact pioneered a collaborative process to rehearse alternative futures. And unmitigated success, the corporation profited from oil price crashes in 1972 and 1986, until by 1990 it had risen from fourteenth to first place among the oil multinationals.

In 1988, Peter Schwartz—Wack’s successor as head of Shell’s Planning Group and the man who had initiated the Soviet studies—left with other Shell alumni to found Global Business Network, or GBN. As an international think-tank and consultancy, GBN’s great success came in 1991 with the Mont Fleur scenarios. Montfleur, a small South African town, was the meeting ground where a multiracial group from opposite ends of that country’s political spectrum—radical Marxist ANC members alongside crypto-fascist National Party Boers—were compelled to agree not only about what futures might exist for their nation, but also to choose among them. This became the catalyst for South Africa’s transition to democracy two years later.

Recently, Schwartz has gone public with a book, “The Long Boom,” co-written with fellow GBN member Peter Leyden. It outlines the scenario that GBN has been pushing over the past three years—in which, based on globalization and waves of new technology kicking in over the next two decades, a sustainable tide of growth should extend to and embrace two to three billion people in China, Japan, Southeast Asia and parts of Latin America. This, as compared to the last wave of development, which involved about 500 million people. The Long Boom scenario proposes a doubling of income for much of the world twice over the next 20 years. Oh, and it also means a huge expansion in lifespans—by as much as 150 or 200 years.

Well, we don’t necessarily buy that last prediction. No evidence exists, for instance, that human brains can handle more than 120 years of functioning and memories. But the rest sounds like nice work if we can get it. After all, as Schwartz points out, it’s just more of what we’ve been doing over the last couple of centuries: a continuation of the deeper Long Boom that’s continued for the better part of 150 years.

Certainly, none of it disagrees with what John Maynard Keynes predicted for 2030 back in his 1930 essay, “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren.” Keynes’s essay, after all, assumed that technologies would progress and accumulate. Yet Keynes couldn’t know what those future technologies would be. Today’s European futurists are employed by corporations, and are much nearer to 2030—therefore they have a much clearer vision of what those future technologies will be.

Full Disclosure
A budding PR flack wrestles with the world he’s helping to create.

Friends and Family
How a man can get lost in the Information Age.

A Different Kind of Start-Up
In a distressed neighborhood at the heart of the high tech revolution, a school gives real options to its students.

CEO’s Having a Baby
Can a pregnant entrepreneur get the venture capital to keep her startup alive?

Escaping the Corporate Cult(ure)
A former Silicon Valley dot com insider lashes out against the technology industry's HR efforts.

Money Changes Everything II
Economic futurists predict that, thanks to technical innovation, the road ahead is paved with gold.

Alarm Clock Communications is dedicated to providing a platform for opinion, and here is our promise: ANY editorial submission that is consistent with our editorial mission and that meets our editorial guidelines will be published. And the best of what we receive will be printed in alarm:clock magazine.So let us know what you think.

andrew@thealarmclock.com & brian@thealarmclock.com