In school they told us how we were supposed to “play the game,” and we grew up thinking that the rules would remain the same as we took our first job, started a family, saw our children leave the house, and went into retirement. The familiar world is rapidly vanishing as we encounter a bewildering new reality driven by a new set of rules. Before we know it there will be more grandparents than grandchildren in most countries; middle-class markets in Asia will be larger than those in the United States and Europe combined; women will own more wealth than men; and we will find ourselves in the midst of more industrial robots than manufacturing workers, more computers than human brains, more sensors than human eyes, and more currencies than countries. That will be the world in 2030.
I have an abiding interest in social sciences, and from the publisher's blurb, I thought that 2030 would be an interesting look at how the world we live in is poised to radically change in the coming decade. But that's not exactly what this is – it's not so much how our lives will change as how the business world will change, with advice on how to use “lateral thinking” to take advantage of these emerging markets. While this was still interesting, and it's certainly not author Mauro Guillen's fault that this wasn't the book I was expecting, it wasn't, ultimately, perfectly suited to my own interests. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The point of this book is that the clock is ticking. The year 2030 isn't some remote point in the unforeseeable future. It's right around the corner, and we need to prepare ourselves for both the opportunities and the challenges. Simply put, the world as we know it today will be gone by 2030, and people will introspectively ask each other, “Where were you when that world came to an end?”
As for emerging markets: the general aging of the Western population (with corresponding low birth rates), the rise of the middle class in China, India, and Africa, and the growing purchasing power of women globally means that businesses will need to amend their offerings for these consumers (but this didn't feel like groundbreaking information). Guillen sees an even greater shift towards both the gig economy (with younger workers not interested in or not able to find employment in a full time career) and the sharing economy (with younger people uninterested in buying their own homes or cars – and that gave me pause as I look ahead to selling my own overpriced house someday to fund a future retirement; I'll need someone to want to buy it). Guillen writes a lot about Airbnb as an example of the kind of lateral thinking that has profitably taken advantage of converging market trends, yet he writes as though most providers are seniors renting out a spare room in their home in order to supplement retirement income, and is that really the case? (And as this was written just before the COVID outbreak, and will be released mid-pandemic, is this still a good example of an enduring business model? Will Airbnb – or anything shared – survive?) The last part of 2030 is about cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, and while I did find this information interesting, I remain skeptical about the degree to which governments will transition to these technologies in just ten more years. I will add that Guillen often ties his ideas into future environmental concerns (the growing pollution in cities as populations concentrate there, the comparative environmental effects of everyone owning a rarely used car vs. everyone sharing a few cars that will need replacing more often, the massive electricity needs of the servers used for blockchain and cryptocurrencies, the advantages of urban vertical farming) but there's nothing about a move away from fossil fuels or other opportunities in emerging green markets.
It isn't yet too late to prepare for 2030. The first, indispensable step is to realize that the world as we know it will irretrievably evanesce at some point during our lifetime, most likely within ten years. This awareness must lead to challenging received wisdom instead of continuing to honor inherited assumptions and ways of thinking. Instead, pursue lateral connections by diversifying your ideas, taking incremental steps, keeping your options open, focusing on the opportunity, considering scarcity as an incentive, and riding the tailwinds.
At the very end, Guillen gives concrete examples of what he means by lateral thinking, but again, this is advice for the entrepreneur, not the average global citizen. I will say that 2030 is certainly well written – it is never boring or technical – and I'll say again that it's not Guillen's fault that there wasn't much in here for me; I'm sure this will find its readers.
An example of something that I did find interesting:
The obesity epidemic is particularly acute in the United States, a country that represents 4 percent of the world's population but nearly 18 percent of total human body mass...The excess weight of Americans is equivalent to about one billion average human beings on the planet.Not to knock on our neighbours to the south (and especially since Canadian obesity stats are likely similar), but I had never seen that written out that way - the extra weight is equivalent to a billion extra humans, with all of the consumption of resources that implies - and while the stat in itself caught my attention, Guillen doesn't extrapolate it out to any particular effect in the year 2030 (an opportunity lost to my thinking, but obviously, just not a part of his thesis).
