Non-Obvious 2017 Edition

How To Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict The Future

Rohit Bhargava

• Publisher: Ideapress Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781940858319
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Consumer Behaviour
• Index: Business

The ALL NEW 2017 edition of the Wall Street Journal bestseller Non-Obvious featuring 15 NEW trends and updated ratings of over 60 previously predicted trends!

• What unexpected insights can a holographic Holocaust survivor and a Japanese film about soy sauce offer us about career development?
• How do self-repairing airplane wings, touch-enabled "skinterface" tattoos and smart locks predict the next trillion dollar industry?
• What can the surprising popularity of an odd Norwegian TV show and the rise of "quiet eating" in Spain teach us about buying behavior?

The answers to these questions may not be all that obvious. And that's exactly the point.

For the past 7 years, marketing expert and Georgetown University Professor Rohit Bhargava has curated his best-selling list of non-obvious trends by asking the questions that most trend predictors miss. It's why his insights on future trends and the art of curating trends have been utilized by dozens of the biggest brands and organizations in the world like Intel, Under Armour and the World Bank.

In this all-new seventh edition, discover what more than a million readers already have: how to use the power of non-obvious thinking to grow your business and make a bigger impact in the world.

Here is a snapshot of trends featured in the report:

• Fierce Femininity – As gender continues to become more fluid, fiercely independent women are increasingly portrayed as heroines, seen as role models and changing the world.
• Passive Loyalty - The ease of switching from brand to brand continues to empowers consumers – forcing brands to get smarter about earning true loyalty of belief versus loyalty of convenience.
• Robot Renaissance - As the utility of robots moves beyond manufacturing and into the home and workplace, they adopt better human-like interfaces and even may have micro-personalities built in.
• Moonshot Entrepreneurship – Inspired by visionary entrepreneurs, more organizations think beyond profit and focus on using business to make a positive social impact and even save the world.

In total, the Non-Obvious 2017 Edition features 15 all-new trends for 2017 across 5 categories including Culture & Consumer Behavior, Marketing & Social Media, Media & Education, Technology & Design plus Economics & Entrepreneurship. The book also features a detailed section with a review and rating for more than 60 previously predicted trends – with longevity ratings for each.

As with the original version, this new edition of Non-Obvious also delves into the curation process the author has used for years to build his Trend Reports and takes readers behind the scenes of trend curation (much to the delight of past readers who have been asking about this for years), and show them the methodology they can use to predict the future for themselves.

Isaac Asimov once wrote that he was not a speed reader, but he was a speed understander. If you want to improve your business or your career by seeing those things that others miss, and becoming a speed understander for yourself, this book can help you get there.

 
INTRODUCTION

“I AM NOT A SPEED READER, I AM A SPEED UNDERSTANDER.”

—ISAAC ASIMOV,
Author, Historian and Biochemist

Isaac Asimov was not just a science fiction writer.

In his prolific lifetime, he wrote nearly 500 books on topics ranging from his beloved science fiction series to a two-volume work explaining the collected literature of William Shakespeare. He even wrote a reader’s guidebook to the Bible.

Even though he was celebrated for his science fiction work, Asimov never defined himself in one category. When asked which his favorite book was, he often joked, “the last one I’ve written.” He wasn’t a scientist or a theologian or a literary critic. He was simply a writer with an incredible curiosity for ideas.

Unlike other experts, he knew that the power of his thinking came from his ability to bring disparate bodies of knowledge together and add his own insight. In fact, he used to describe himself as a “speed understander,” a skill he clearly relied on to help him maintain a grueling schedule of publishing more than 15 books a year at his peak.

What if each of us could become a “speed understander” like Asimov?

I believe we can.

The simple aim of this book is to teach you how to see the things that others miss. I call that “Non-Obvious” thinking, and learning how to do it can change your business and your career.

The context within which I’ll talk about this type of thinking is business trends. For better or worse, most of us are fascinated by trends and those who predict them. We see these annual predictions as a glimpse into the future and they capture our imagination.

There’s only one problem—most of them are based on guesswork or lazy thinking. They are obvious instead of Non-Obvious.

This book was inspired by the landslide of obvious ideas we see published today.

In a world where anyone is one button away from being a self-declared expert, learning to think differently is more important than ever. Observing and curating ideas can lead to a unique understanding of why people choose to buy, sell or believe anything.

This book aims to teach you the skills to avoid the obvious and see the ideas, patterns and trends that others miss.

A great trend is a unique curated observation about the accelerating present.

Great trends are never predictions about the world 20 years from now. Those are most often guesses or wishful thinking. How many trend forecasters do you think predicted the rise of something like Twitter back in 1997? Exactly zero.

Yet this doesn’t mean trends are useless. The most powerful trends can offer predictions for the short-term future based on observing the present. And knowing the short-term future is more valuable than you may think.

Why Does Trend Curation Matter?

Most of our life decisions happen in the short term, though we may describe them differently. You choose to start a business in the short term. You choose whom to marry in the short term. You change careers from one role to the next, all in the short term.

Long-term decisions start in the short term, so understanding how the world is changing in real time is far more valuable immediately than trying to guess what will happen in the world 20 years from now.

When I speak on stage, I often describe myself first as a “trend curator.” The reason I use that term is because it describes my passion for collecting ideas and taking the time to see the patterns in them to describe the world in new and interesting ways.

For the past six years, I have published a curated look at the 15 biggest trends that will shape the business world in the year to come. Each year it is called the Non-Obvious Trend Report and each edition is based on a year of research, conversation, thinking and writing.

Across that time, I have advised some of the largest brands in the world on business strategy, taught marketing courses at Georgetown University and spoken at events in 32 countries around the world.

All of this gives me the valuable chance to work in dozens of different industries and study media, culture, marketing, technology, design and economics with an unfiltered eye. Each year, I also read or review dozens of books, and buy magazines on everything from cloud computing to Amish farming methods.

My philosophy is to collect ideas the way frequent fliers collect miles—as momentary rewards to use for later redemption.

Why I Wrote This Book

This “redemption” comes in the form of my annual trend report, but unlike many other trend forecasters simply sharing my annual report is only the beginning. If I really believe in the value of curating trends, and that anyone can learn to do it, then it is also important for me to share my process for how to do it.

So this book is divided into four sections.

Part I is dedicated to my methods of trend curation, which I have usually only shared in depth through private workshops or with my students in class. You will learn the greatest myths of trend prediction, five essential habits of trend curators and my own step-by-step approach to curating trends, which I call the Haystack Method.

Part II is the 2017 edition of the Non-Obvious Trend Report, featuring 15 new ideas that will shape business in the year to come. Each trend features supporting stories and research, as well as ideas for how to apply the trend to your own business or career.

Part III is filled with tips on making trends actionable, including a short description of workshops to bring trends to life. In this part, I also discuss the importance of anti-trends and how to use “intersection thinking” to see the patterns between industries and stories.

Finally, Part IV is a new look at 105 previously predicted trends from the past six years along with an honest assessment and rating for how each one performed over time since it was originally predicted.

You can choose to read this book in the order it was published or you can skip back and forth between trends and techniques. Whether you choose to focus on my predictions for 2017 and how to apply them, or learning the techniques of trend curation and Non-Obvious thinking for yourself, this book can be read in short bursts or all at once.

Like Asimov, you don’t need to be a speed reader.

Being a speed understander, however, is a worthy aspiration. It is my hope that this book will help you get there.

1
The Norwegian Billionaire:
Why Most Trend Predictions Are Spectacularly Useless

In 1996 Christian Ringnes was a billionaire with the ultimate first-world problem – he was running out of space.

As one of the richest men in Norway, Ringnes is well known as a flamboyant businessman and art collector whose family started the country’s largest brewery more than a hundred years ago. In his hometown of Oslo, Ringnes owns several restaurants and museums, and donated more than $70 million for the creation of a large sculpture and cultural park, which opened in 2013.

In his heart, Ringnes is a collector. Over decades he has built one of the largest private collections of art in the world. Yet his real legacy may come from something far more unique: his lifelong obsession with collecting mini liquor bottles.

This fixation on mini liquor bottles began for Ringnes at the age of seven when he received an unusual gift from his father: a half-empty miniature liquor bottle. It was this afterthought of a gift that led him on a path towards amassing what is recognized today as the largest independent mini-bottle collection in the world with over 52,000 miniature liquor bottles.

Unfortunately, his decades-long obsession eventually ran into an insurmountable opponent—his late wife, Denise.

As the now legendary story goes, Denise wasn’t too happy with the disorganization of having all these bottles around the house. After years of frustration, she offered him an ultimatum: either find something to do with all those bottles or start selling them.

Like any avid collector, Ringnes couldn’t bear the thought of selling them, so he created a perfectly obvious solution based on his wealth and personality.

He commissioned a museum.

“To Collect Is Human”

Today the Mini Bottle Gallery in downtown Oslo is one of the world’s top quirky museum destinations, routinely featured in irreverent travel guides and global lists of must-see Scandinavian tourist attractions. Beyond providing a place for Ringnes to put all of his mini bottles, the gallery is also a popular event venue with an in-house restaurant.

It was this event space and restaurant that offered me my first personal introduction to Ringnes and his story. I was in Oslo for an event and the conference team had organized a tour and dinner at the Mini Bottle Gallery.

I have 52,500 different miniature bottles in a museum in Oslo. They’re completely useless. But men, we like collecting. We like having things. That’s human. Once you get fascinated by something, you want it and then you start collecting.

—Christian Ringnes
(From interview in Arterritory.com magazine)

It lived up to its quirky reputation.

The entrance to the museum was a bottle shaped hallway leading into an open lobby with a champagne waterfall. As you moved from room to room, each featured its own composed soundtrack, customized lighting and unique smells.

Only steps into the tour, it was clear the gallery was more than just stacks of bottles lined along the walls of a display case in random fashion. Like all great museum experiences, the rooms of the Mini Bottle Gallery had been carefully curated.

The mini bottles were grouped into intriguing themes ranging from a brothel themed Room of Sin with mini-bottles from the Dutch Red Light District, to a Horror Room featuring liquor bottles with trapped objects floating inside like mice and worms.

There was a Jungle Room, a Room of Famous Persons, and rooms themed around sports, fruits, birds, circus performers and the occult. There was even an entire room featuring the iconic porcelain series of the Delft Blue KLM houses, a series of tiny Dutch rowhouse-shaped liquor bottles given away to passengers by KLM Airlines for more than five decades.

Across all these rooms, the gallery typically has more than 12,000 bottles on display at any one time. The rest are stored in a bottle vault below the museum and available for display when needed.

Adding Meaning to Noise

The Mini Bottle Gallery only displays about 20% of Ringnes’ full collection at any time, and carefully keeps the rest in storage. This thoughtful curation makes the experience of seeing them valuable.

If you consider the amount of media any of us is exposed to on an average day, the quest to find meaning amongst the noise is a familiar challenge. Navigating information overload requires the same disc...