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Having, after the best part of a decade, completed this collection of material, I have come to recognize something I have known all along: the most important parts of it are those where I have addressed the long-term future of humanity.
Thus, in the couple of decades I spent at the Open University, I put together a large amount of research material, which eventually resulted in my PhD but – more importantly – represented my greatest contribution to the long-term health of the global economy:
Above all in this context, this particularly large group of topics represents the uniquely comprehensive database - of several hundred items - which offered predictions across ‘all of human activity’; where this was to be my final academic contribution to society in general. This database is handled first of all through a hierarchy: 2023 FUTURE OBSERVATORY. However, it is also available via a tabular approach, sorted by category, where the individual items are extensively hyperlinked: 20231 HYPERLINKED FUTURE OBSERVATORY.
2012 MARKETING MATERIAL – on the other hand, my earlier academic interest, derived from my previous career, was in marketing - the staring point for looking at the future - and my writings in this field have now been read by hundreds of thousands.
Extracts from this material can also be found on Wikipedia. In addition debate on the current developments can be followed on my blog at:
On the other hand, to fully appreciate the context from which these ideas emerged, you need to know about me. To know why I have these beliefs, and - from an examination of my own very varied life - to see how they are derived from real life in the second half of the 20th century. This is the part of the work which can be best described as an autobiography, though those game enthusiasts amongst you may also consider it to be a challenge to see how many other perspectives you can attach to my life:
1940-2000, living on the precarious edge of tomorrow
(or go to
main index of autobiography) I came into this world, in 1940, with German bombs raining down all around me. A few miles away, across the River Mersey, Liverpool blazed from end to end. In this way, from its very start, my life - along with contemporary civilization as a whole – was created in the fires started by a fascist government’s imperial ambitions. Sixty years later, as the new millennium dawned, my productive life came to an end – and the promise of that new millennium was dimmed – as yet another imperialist government rained down its more sophisticated bombs on a different set of innocent citizens. This time the perpetrators, hiding their fascist tendencies under the term neo-con, were the Americans determined to use their new hegemony to enforce their own self-interested demands. So what had changed? Some pessimists would argue that little had in fact changed. All that had been proved was that conflict, in support of greed, was the natural vocation of man! The spoils belonged to the most powerful, the victors and typically the least principled. In this compilation I would beg to differ. The reality is that these six decades covered the period when the world as a whole changed at a rate which was an order of magnitude faster than ever before. Moreover, this change impacted almost all aspects of our existence; from the richest western aristocrat to the poorest third world subsistence farmer. Whatever name you choose to give them, revolutionary forces had been let loose. As just one personal example, as one of the millions working on the land, at the beginning of the period I helped hill farmers bring in their harvest of hay on horse drawn wagons. At the end of I, though, I advised the President of the European Commission on how the emerging global networks would reshape the future of the world. Accordingly, the ‘auto-biographical’ elements of this compilation document my part in the events which shaped the world over the last half of the 20th century. This inevitably means that the material it contains is extensive, with – depending upon how you approach it - between 800,000 and two million words at your beck and call. In addition, the variety of different forces driving these revolutions inevitably means that relationships between the elements are complex. Bringing all of this together in the linear, chapter by chapter, format that has previously been employed in printed books - but is here only used in the 150,000 word of the summarised chapters ,which you may also view - would have set you – the reader – an impossible task. Instead, taking some advantage of modern technology, this compilation has generally been organized in a hierarchical format; using hyperlinks which lead from the top level to ever more detailed descriptions, so that you can create your own path through the parts that may be of interest to you. Mostly, however, the autobiographical elements illustrate my life as a fairly typical middle-class individual, buffeted by the forces of change which we barely understood at the time and swept to the future through the fires of time which scorched all our lives. In part, though, it also describes some of the key events where – by chance – I became one of those making my own contribution to the winds of change which fanned those fires. This ‘autobiography’ is therefore unlike almost any other. Not least, as you will already have discerned, the sheer amount of material needed, to do justice to all the events I have encountered on my dance through time, is vast. As I have already indicated, there are more than 2 million words in total, organized into more than 2,000 separate sections. This overall material is in turn made up of something like 800,000 words of autobiography (in 500 sections), supported by 1½ million words of my previously published material (in 1,500 articles/chapters) which flesh out the ideas contained in the autobiography itself. As I have already suggested, the level of complexity is an order of magnitude greater than that attempted by most other authors. On the other hand, the work justifies, indeed demands, so much material; simply because I make no claim to know what parts of it future generations might reasonably consider to be of interest. Our own historians have often found that it is the domestic ‘trivia’ of the past which best illustrate what life at the time was like. But, at the time, such trivia were so rapidly consigned to the dustbin that they have now become rare in their own right. That is, in any case, my excuse for providing my own extensive collection of these ‘trivia’. Of course, like most authors, I do not really want to admit to them really being worthless trivia; and I hope you too will find them of some value. On the other hand, accepting the inevitable reality that few of you will find time to read all of the material in this compilation, I have arranged it so that you should at least be able - by making use of the sectional nature of the material - to confine your own searches just to the topics which are of most interest to you. More important, perhaps, it is worth noting that – in line with this openness to future readers – the viewpoint it adopts attempts to be that from a century or more ahead. This is, in part, because few in our own time – including me - fully appreciate what is really happening to them. We only notice the immediate events, where the structural changes responsible for them are largely invisible to us. We really can’t see the shape of the wood we are traversing for the trees. In the main, though, it is because in the centuries ahead historical data miners, the archaeologists of those times, will want to understand what wider forces drove the changes occurring in our time. Moreover, they will need to fully understand the context within which the crucial events are set. Indeed, the archaeologists of our own time delight in searching through the refuse tips of the past to understand – for example from the shards of pottery – what the minutiae of previous lives were truly like. Creating the literary equivalent, I simply do not know what future generations will consider to be dross and what they will cherish as treasure. Accordingly, I have as far as possible included everything. Dig deep enough through the literary dross and you will probably find the odd kitchen sink or two, but I hope you may also find the occasional jewel! All of this, though, has the significant advantage that you, the reader, can adopt your own perspective(s). Indeed, adopting such different perspectives will clearly show the various ways that my experience has changed as I have gone through the life-transforming events occurring across industry and government; and across society in general. As you will soon see, I have already sketched out several dozen different perspectives which each lead to very different pictures of my life and times. You can, though, go further and choose your own personal viewpoint; much as you might have done had you come to know me personally over the years. I will return to these other perspectives later, but first an outline of my life and the fires which, from time to time, have tested it. I have said this has to be seen as a semi-fictional autobiography, not least because I have never kept a detailed diary. To be honest I have never, until now, considered that the trivia of my life would be of interest to anyone – not even to myself in my dotage! The events I describe are, therefore, my present memories of what happened in the past; distorted by the passage of the years. On the other hand, such distance has helped me put the importance of these events better into perspective. In retrospect, some – especially the events which had a negative impact on my life – now seem much less important; though, at the time, they dominated my thoughts. On the other hand, some – which I would have almost overlooked at the time – now seem to hold much greater significance in the wider scheme of things. In any case, it is not as if I have made no effort to record events. Thus, I have documented the most important events of my life in one form or another, even if not as a detailed day-to-day diary of ins and outs, and weather reports. The records I actually made were very informal, however, until the first collection of this material started in the late 1970s; three decades ago. To cap it all, much of the last decade of this compilation – including almost all of the supporting material - was already present as the dozens of books, along with almost a hundred articles and news stories, I published at this time. I have included this published material, which accounts for something like two thirds of the overall content, partly because it offers an insight into my thought processes and how these developed. Mainly, though, it is because the subjects of these publications are close to the lines of reasoning which shaped the overall compilation. These thoughts focus not just on my travels through the fires of time but on the issues shaping society as a whole. As such they powerfully sum up my own ideas, from the viewpoint of the end of the first millennium, as to where the second millennium will lead us. I am not putting everything into the mix however. One absence, which might be crucial in some other autobiographies, is a warts and all record of the mishaps in my private life and especially of marital discord. My wife has – understandably – asked that anything of this kind should be excluded. So for her sake, and that of my children, the worst excesses have been censored. Equally, some of the more salacious comments I might have made about my friends and acquaintances, and even enemies, have similarly been excised; for they would be out of place in this collection of material. I positively choose not to revenge myself even on those who have most severely harmed me. In any case, this compilation does not need to draw on such very personal anecdotes. These would throw little light on the issues to which I want to draw attention. There are plenty of other autobiographies whose main selling point is the revelation of such intimacies. The only exceptions here are contained in the mass of legal material covering the end of the period, which – as a matter of public record - must necessarily be reported in its entirety. The courts have always provided the most salacious stories for the News of the World! Having said all that, this censorship has had a negligible effect upon the ‘story’ I wish to tell; since this concerns the very shape of the times I have lived through, of the fires I have danced through. Purely domestic considerations were never more than peripheral to the main story, though that in turn may be why they became so personally explosive at times! Anyway, let the story now begin. As much of this compilation is in praise of the middle classes, my antecedents were, I suppose, mostly located in the lower middle class of their times. Those on my father’s side had been immersed in the industrial revolution, in relatively high status jobs; for example as station-masters or building supervisors - where my great grandfather, for example, was in charge of the bricklayers building Lime Street Station in Liverpool. But, even then, their daughters were typically destined to go into service with the ‘gentry’, where the service demanded by these gentlemen was often of a very personal kind. Those on my mother’s side had been involved in the comparable social revolution. In particular, my grandfather was a teacher who – in his earlier years – had been the secretary of a friendly society; one of the precursors of the modern trade unions. All who were closest to me, in the generation ahead of me, had come together as managers of high-tech chemical production for a major multinational – Unilever – which was much more typical of the situation in mid 20th century. Indeed, most of the first two decades of my life was lived on one of Unilever’s factory villages – built house its workers – albeit we lived in a Georgian mansion built for its management. I was not an especially precocious child. The teachers at my first school thought I was not that bright; indeed they were convinced I was rather dim! It was only when I started at the prep school of one of the top dozen or so public schools – which my parents could barely afford, even with me as a day boy – that I started to shine. From there I steadily progressed until, with a coveted state scholarship under my belt, I entered on the most elite academic course in the country; Physics at Imperial College. Actually, until just a few months before, my career was seemingly destined to be as an astrophysicist. Interest in the first two decades of my life will, therefore, be in terms of its example of middle-class childhood and youth at the time. In reality, for most of this time society expected us to behave in the same way as our predecessors had done for the previous half century or so. Locked into the rigid class framework of the time, my place in the middle-class society of the future was already booked. In fact, thanks to my academic progress, it was to be in the upper middle class. I, and everyone else, knew exactly where I stood. Although revolutionary forces had already been set in motion by the second world war, which had ended ten years previously, it was only in my late teens that things started to change for my generation. The pattern was set when we became the first teenagers. Before our time the concept hadn’t even existed. You went straight from childhood into work. Now we became a new force to be reckoned with. We discovered rock & roll, or perhaps it is fairer to say they discovered us. Even then I wasn’t directly involved in the scene. I was a modern jazz aficionado. But the new pop scene infected the whole of my age group and, above all, empowered us to become the new kids on the block. Above all, for the first time it gave us the god-given right to challenge our elders! I was more much directly affected by these new forces when I went up to university. Not least, by default, I effectively abandoned my pursuit of academic standing in favour of exploring the new revolution. Over the next three years I barely scraped a third and, by choice, headed off to become one of the new breed of managers rather than an astrophysicist. In particular, though, I found myself at the heart of the revolutionary forces which were to explode on the scene later in the 1960s. At that time the leading edge of revolution in the UK was represented by the anti-apartheid movement. Accordingly, I – with some friends – set up the student anti-apartheid movement. This effort introduced me to the world of mass demonstrations, at one extreme, and to that of national politics, at the other. At the age of twenty I regularly met with Nobel prize winners and ambassadors. Not least, to my surprise and that of everyone else, I started the successful move to get South Africa expelled from the Commonwealth. When most people nostalgically recall the 1960s they think of the revolutions of that time as encompassing all the young. That is, I suspect, a quite false picture. Although the pop bandwagon was well and truly rolling, the real sexual revolution didn’t arrive until the 1970s, and most of the young were passed by in terms of the political revolutions. They only woke up to it in the 1980s, when Margaret Thatcher perverted their newly found revolutionary ambitions to her own right-wing ends. However, for those few of us who were later to become the leaders of society it really was a wonderful time! You could almost ‘smell’ the outstanding future which awaited us. It was to be a much better, social democratic if not Marxist, future. It was a golden age, promising ever more exceptional benefits to come. Of course, that future never came! The establishment fought back and – with typical efficiency – captured the new society and bent it to its own ends. I didn’t go into politics or the media, as did my peers in these revolutions and as did my best man Jon. Instead I went into management, specifically into marketing management. This was where – in practice - the leading-edge action really was; rather than the civil service which was then the usual choice of the high flyers. Initially I went into an advertising agency which – as promoted by Hollywood – then represented the most glamorous profession. Through it I found myself close to those in high society involved in the Profumo affair. Then I became a brand manager, which was the job which – over the next decade – developed into the most powerful junior management role of all. At the heart of the new consumerist society, we felt we were the rulers of society; and we were. Finally, before the age of thirty, I became a general manager in a multinational conglomerate; promised a seat on the board. This career progress was quite dramatic, indeed meteoric, in an age when the old order still largely held; where CEOs below the age of 60 were almost unheard of, and almost all board members were over the age of fifty. I was indeed a very high flyer!. It was during this decade of my career that I gained my widest experience of the ‘old’ industries; from those in FMCG (Fast Moving Consumer Goods), then at the pinnacle of the emerging consumerist society, to the very different problems of the dying rubber industry. For benefit of future generations, who will no doubt think of a rubber moulding job shop as something that Dickens wrote about, this compilation describes the quite different circumstances which pertained to each of these old industries. At the same time it reflects my experiences across a wide range of roles within them, from researcher to marketer to production manager. In particular, it records my experiences of various aspects of general management – from brand manager to divisional manager. Again, these experiences - which were typically at the leading edge of the new ‘profession’ of general management later formalized in the MBA – were definitive of the situation at the time. These experiences were encapsulated later in my best-selling management text book. Then it all fell apart. I discovered that a corporate board – then and now best seen as a cockpit of political infighting – was not where I wanted to be. So, spurred on my way by an assortment of daggers in my back, I headed for a company which was then just about the best managed in the world, IBM. For the next decade and a half I was part of the IBM team which almost took over the world, and certainly led us all into the IT Revolution which reshaped society. Albeit at a more junior level, though with an ambivalent role in IBM’s development, I found myself once more part of that revolution. I do seem to find myself regularly storming the barricades of whatever establishment I come up against. At the time the London Business School categorized me, I suspect correctly, as a dedicated – almost obsessive - change agent! Even though my formal status was at best that of a middle manager, my peculiar position in IBM allowed me to observe the actions of its board level management; and occasionally to influence these. It was at the time when IBM was at the peak of its power. It has, of course, since atrophied to become just another multinational; and the lessons it once demonstrated to the world have long since been dismissed as mere illusions. Yet I continue to believe that, as recorded in my best-selling book about the corporation, IBM – or at least the confident IBM of that time a quarter of a century ago – held many of the secrets of management still to come. The IBM years were also the time when my ‘private’ life most closely paralleled that of the newly emerging middle-class of managers and professionals. Living on one of the new housing estates which catered to this new market, our friends typically were middle managers, IT professionals, architects and senior civil servants. The life we led was stimulating, yet typical of the confident new lifestyles being adopted by these emerging mass leaders of society. At the same time my return to politics, as a borough councilor, was – as might by now be expected – ahead of its time; in that I represented the first of the ambitious new residents associations. The final stage of my working life took me into the world of academia – where perhaps I should have taken myself in earlier times. Even here, though, I was never much like the average academic. Not least, I once more refused to play the vicious political games necessary for career progress. Much to my surprise, I still made the grade of Senior Lecturer, though not that of Professor; which might have been expected in view of my position as one of the few internationally recognized figures within the Open University Business School. Worse still, my dedication to personal integrity once more eventually destroyed me. In the meantime, though, I directly taught tens of thousands of managers what marketing and corporate strategy really should be about; and indirectly, through the books I was now writing, influenced hundreds of thousands of others! Above all, though, I managed two especially important projects which were quite different to anything I had previously undertaken, and very different to the work of other academics. The first of these, which came about almost accidentally, was helping the new government of Ethiopia move that nation – with a population of 60 million - from Marxism to social democracy. This started as an educational project, teaching – on behalf of the UK Foreign & Commonwealth Office (FCO) – the three man junta (President, Prime Minister and Minister of Defence) who, following their military success in the civil war, ran the country. I, and my team of senior OU academics, taught them and their colleagues the management skills needed for their new roles in peace-time government. For me it grew into an even more important role when, almost as a double agent, I became the main link between the three man junta and the western governments. In a space of two years this saw me setting up their top level new diplomatic structures, linking the government to the outside world, negotiating a $1 billion loan from the World Bank, which the IMF considered to be the most successful ever, and successfully negotiating a resolution of the renewed civil war, which had seen more than 100,00 soldiers deployed in the field. To say it was an exciting time would be to grossly underestimate the stresses of working, as some would see, as a double agent. I reported to the SIS (Secret Intelligence Services) in the UK, but I am still not certain whether this was to the FCO’s own SIS or MI6; since my handlers in Ethiopia were the FCO but those in the UK were MI6! On the other side of the double agent equation, my main contact was the Ethiopian Minister of Defence, the outstanding – but largely unknown - general who had brilliantly led the rebel army to it’s the greatest military successes in the 1980s. Although I was the teacher, I learnt as much from the experience as my students. Moreover, these lessons were not just about Ethiopia, or even about the dilemmas facing third world nations, but just as much about the cultural blind spots to be found in our own western ‘democracies’. Bringing a new nation across from Marxism to social democracy clearly exposed the anomalies inherent in the market economies which we take for granted. It also highlighted how narrow was the western, US, vision of what democracy should be about. In the process I made some very good friends, amongst the senior members of government, though, with several thousand miles between us, I have once more not been able to maintain these friendships! Such is the price I, and my peers, have paid for our roving careers! My final act was, for once, planned. It was to indulge in the research I had long promised myself. This, though, represented the culmination of the several decades of work I had expended on long range planning, now crystallized as an academic form of futurology. The research itself was truly leading-edge, requiring the development of a whole raft of new techniques. However, I regret to say that, as is too often the case, my fellow academics failed to recognize its importance. Even my PhD did not materialize until two weeks after I had retired! Worse, OUBS management thought my work was some form of joke; though I am still grateful to the OU’s Vice Chancellor who – alone - always was supportive. Fortunately the national and international governments I dealt with did recognize the value of my work. Thus, with the help of the VC, I became one of the great and good working on a key DTI task force which examined how the growing problem of aging might be overcome. In Europe I became an advisor to the then President of the European Commission, Jacques Santerre, indirectly through its think-tank in Seville and more directly through that in his personal cabinet. On the global stage I was accredited by UNESCO as an NGO, not least for its crucial inter-governmental meeting to agree its statement of cultural rights my contribution may eventually – I hope – ease the passage of the remaining third world nations to something approaching parity with the West. Expanding my sphere of influence, I backed up these high level contacts with a PR campaign which saw me regularly featuring in the broadsheets and on television and radio. Most impactful of all, at the Millennium I promoted the concept of the woman’s century to come; which, for a while at least, was quite influential. I had always expected to reach ‘burn out’ at the Millennium; and was, in a sense on target in that respect. What I had not expected was, though, that this last fatal fire was applied by my management at the OUBS. The last evil force in my life, the then Dean, took great satisfaction in destroying not just my career but my whole life at the time. Such was the fitting end to my meteoric career. So much for ‘simple’ part of my autobiography. Now for the other, more complex, perspectives; which document the changes which have in the past half century, and will in the centuries to come, afflicted society. First, come the changes across the old and new industries – where the world has been turned upside down. In the days of my childhood the heavy industries, based on coal and steel, dominated our economy; employing millions of unionized labourers. ICI, for whom I later worked as a consultant, was the most admired company, with its hundreds of acres of bulk chemicals plants at the forefront of technology. Now almost all of that heavy industry has gone. In large part these jobs have fled to the low wage economies in the developing world, in a perverse form of ‘trickle-down’. In part they have been lost to new technology, where metal bashing has long since been overtaken by injection moulded plastic. Not least, the miniaturization coming from the computer industries has led to much smaller parts, assembled by women’s more nimble – and cheaper – fingers! Indeed, the most successful firms are the software houses who manufacture nothing. In any case, much of employment has shifted to the service industries. Marketing, in its broadest sense, has now become the biggest form of employment; and Tesco has become the dominant force in the UK markets. At the beginning of the period the manual worker, in dirty overalls labouring in unpleasant conditions, was the norm. Now the office worker, garbed in the fashion of the day, spends her time talking on the phone to customers. The surprising development, in the service economy, has been the lack of service! The paradox is that the developments in communications, which should have led to much better - one on one – service, have been used instead to reduce costs; where shoddy service is now deemed acceptable at ever level. The primacy of profits has overtaken customer service. Even the Open University, which should have been an ideal model – and for a quarter of a century was an example of the best practice – has recently been infected by the bug! It seems clear that the future will see a return to a genuine service culture. Indeed, the examples of both IBM and The Open University, before they succumbed to the perverse demands of ‘market forces’ are the best indicators of what should be to come. In terms of management styles, the traditional hierarchical structures – which transmitted the orders to blue-collar workers following detailed rules on assembly lines – are giving way to team management – where white-collar staff have to be given the autonomy needed to deal with the multifarious problems posed by customers. The right-wing dogmas promoted by the neo-cons may have temporarily held back the flow of time in western management circles, and led to the cult of god-given powers – along with matching salaries - awarded to CEOs, but even senior management increasingly works in a collegial environment, where peer-to-peer communication – through horizontal networks - is now the norm. The last decade of my work was devoted to predicting the long range future of society. In essence, this compilation is the final result of that work. Certainly, a very large part of the supporting material – probably more than half of the overall content if the related publications are taken into account – is based on my work on these predictions. Having understood where they have come from, the ability to weave these predictions into the plans for your own future is the highest reward you will gain for finding your way through the maze. The future is there. All you have to do is find it! If, however, you prefer the traditional form of book you can see extracts of the material in this form, with each chapter dedicated to a decade. You can also buy this book ('A Dance Through the Fires of Time', by David Mercer') from Amazon.
This FutureObservatory web-site is maintained by David Mercer. If you find any errors, please email him on MercerDavidS@AOL.com also quoting the page where the error is.
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