The future of business

Futurology, with its futurologists or futurists, is haphazard (непредсказуемый) activity, despite attempts to formalize it. There is the Delphi method, where experts make their forecast about a subject independently, and a referee circulates each forecast to the other members of the group, who comment on each other’s observations until they reach a consensus.

This can be one element of the strategy, where companies make long-term plans about future activities. Here, they have to anticipate (предвидеть) competitor’s activities as well as trends in the general economic environment. Very large companies work on scenario planning, imagining different ways in which they current situation may evolve (эволюционировать), and their place in it, including ways in which they may ‘encourage’(содействовать) it to develop in their favour. Future successful products are notoriously hard to predict, as are the subtle (тонкий) combinations of social, cultural and technological circumstances that something may succeed at one time but not another. The E-commerce business brief looks at some of the trends in e-commerce and Internet use in this context.

One of the social predictions made 30 years ago was that people would work less and have more leisure time, but the opposite has occurred. No one foresaw haw the computer would evolve away from the mainframe (громоздкий) and facilitate a social development like working from home and while on the move, thanks to laptops and, in a parallel development, mobile phones. Similarly, the Internet may have social effects that we cannot envisage, let alone predict.

A powerful force 30 years ago was protest at the way society and the economy were organized, for example against ‘faceless multinationals’. After a long period where youth shed its rebellious (повстанцы) reputation, in this context at least, there are signs that activism outside traditional political parties is re-emerging (возникать) as a social force, this time organized on global level – witness (свидетельствовать) the regular violent (жёсткие) demonstrations against recent meetings of the International Monetary Fund and the World Trade Organization, with planning of protests co-ordinated over the Internet. This trend may intensify (усилиться).

Another factor that will certainly affect the way the future of business develops is global warming, which is now, after ten years of debate over whether it is happening or not, an incontrovertible fact. Some possible consequences (последствия) of the greenhouse effect have been predicted, but there will certainly be others we cannot even imagine.