Norman Macrae Future History Summary

Norman Macrae Future History Summary

Norman told some of the greatest ever: at least, ones that while he Deputy Edited The Economist (1950s-1980s) raised circulation from 4th ranked weekly to one of a kind global

Some of the world's favourites appeared to be:
on countries (about 10 foretold), starting with Japan (1,, in the 1960s for which on retirement he was awarded the Emperor's Order of the Rising sun for raising world trade to something more inspiring than just money; the clue here was to detect a place system that was compounding a great difference in Japan's case better total quality (in the 60s with much lower cost) than anyone- so good to become a world market leader in industries it prioritised eg cars, elecronics, cameras even though it had no ad budgets as was at time last into the markets- demonstrating that if you serve a better product, everyone will market you

On changing from machine-ruled organisation to service economic systems (ie beyond just hierarchical control to): empowering the greatest innovators (entrepreneurial revolution 1976), regarding the greatest service teams (Intrapreneurial now 1982)

Norman's Piece De Resistance: wasn't published in his annual Economist surveys but in a book The 2024 Report on the 40 years (1984-2024) when networks of people would change the world. (This book rolled out in different languages: American 2025 Report, French and German 2026 Reports). You can judge its currency for 2005 here, , and in this lies a warning - there were in any system of systems future 2 opposite poles , and not much in between. The 2024's Report concentrated on how to get to the optimistic scenario: using network connectivity to pass Buckminster's final examination in a world where all 6 billion people were demonstrably much better off by cooperating; however the opposite scenario was recognised as being almost exactly like Orwell's story (whose only error in its logics was being 40 years too early). In 2005, the window of opportunity lies with today's generation and the compound outcome for 2024 remains unclear, but it won't be in between.

One of the great advantages of future history storytelling -for all who participate as writers and readers and conversationalists - is that it can be a largely collaborative affair. From the writer's perspective of the biggest future trends that were already changing somewhere: there was seldom so much difference between Norman's views of the future & Drucker's on knowledge workers or Tofler's on Future Shocks or Gifford's Intrapreneurs. Partly this was because they went round to many of the same leadership conferences. And when it came to Naisbitt's Megatrend Series, Norman actually edited one of the UK editions of that. And as a minor point, Norman's 2024 was actualy co-authored by a dosctor in biology who also wrote science fiction stories, and a societal researcher in diversity who also pioneered some of the UK's early live experimnts in elearning content.

To celebrate his retirement at the age of 65, Norman embarked on a different kind of future history. The person he thought had most influence on chabging the world whose story had not yet been made into a full biography. He chose John von Neumann, and I as a mathematician I am very glad he did. Because the values of mathematics and open collaborative computing that Johnny stood for are argely being eroded by those big decison makers currently funding research & learning. This shows how vicious academia and government research funding has become (one of the longest open purposes yet subject to the same wrong maths as is destroying the integrity and deepest purpose of most organisational systems) in terms of not connecting the long term human good more clearly than I believe any other future history could.

A few other stories from over several thousand lead editorials and pamphlets written: homes for the people 1967