Trend, We Hardly Knew Ye

"One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture, and if it were possible, to speak a few reasonable words."
--Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Ten years ago, no one predicted that the largest user of the U.S Mail today would be a video-rental company trafficking in video discs. Ten years ago, thousands of people knowingly predicted that we would today be downloading movies into our homes. The first trend is raging, the second may be another ten years away.

25 years ago, no one predicted that most of America would spend time each week browsing among colorful boxes at the local video-rental store. 25 years ago, the press was awash with predictions of the imminent coming of interactive home video and the death of terrestrial, analog TV and radio. The first trend was with us for 20 years and is now fading. The second is just sputtering to life.

We are terrible at knowing trends. The problem is often not that we don’t know what will happen. We are just clueless about when. We have two favorite time frames for trends: within 5 years from now, and never.

This misapprehension is fed by a school of management that talks about fast. As in the wildly successful magazine "Fast Company," whose slogan is “The magazine for a generation of business leaders with high expectations for their companies -- and even higher expectations for themselves.”

Do the high expectations include being right about trends?