Do you want to predict the future? Predict which industry will grow most? Predict what will impact your business most? Well, you can. You can be that superstar who predicts the most influential trend.
I am not selling a crystal ball or some ancient text that will help you decipher the movement of stars. Like any other skill, predicting future needs a lot of practice and sustained efforts. Rohit Bhargava strongly believes predicting future can be learned like any other skill. You don’t need to be an industry veteran or an expert in any specific field to see what is coming next. On the contrary, the author believes that it is the constricted view of one specific area that inhibits the ability to predict upcoming trends the most.
In Non-Obvious, author and Georgetown University professor unravels the mystery of predicting trends that will help you create business opportunities and tweak your business to grow in a dynamic social and technological world. Rohit Bhargava is the Founder of Influential Marketing Group and consults with various big brands on business and communications strategy.
Non-Obvious: How to Think Different, Curate Ideas & Predict the Future
Author: Rohit Bhargava Pages: 252 pages Publisher: Ideapress Publishing (March 29, 2015) ISBN-10: 1940858100, 978-1940858104
The first part, The Art of Trend Curation, talks about how everyone can keep track of what is happening in various industries and then work toward spotting trends. No. Not spotting. As the author says, trends are not birds that you can spot at a bird sanctuary. Predicting trends is building your own insights. It is the Wisdom part of the Data->Information->Knowledge-> Wisdom axis. The author guides you on how to focus in each of these stages and develop insights.
Part II of Non-Obvious, The 2015 Non-Obvious Report, is a series of trends that the author believes will dominate 2015. Of course, just knowing what is happening or will happen in the next year doesn’t mean anything, unless we know how to use the information for specific purposes.
For each trend, the author simplifies this information further by giving readers the specifics like who will be impacted most by a particular trend and how they can use that specific trend in their business and life. For example, the author talks of the important shift in the industry from Marketing to Brand Management. He points out that professionals and organizational leaders should use this trend to build meaningful customer experience over traditional marketing approaches.
There is also a lot of information for content creators and content marketing professionals as the author talks about the importance of Glanceable Content.
In the third part of the book, The Trend Action Guide, the author provides the tools to implement the trends through different formulated workshops that focus on Customer Journey to Storytelling. Readers can use this as a guide for self-study or use the topics to conduct the workshops at their organization.
If you are not a voracious reader, the author will ask you to become that, but until you become an expert rapid reader, Non-Obvious is a book every marketer and brand manager should have on their 2015 reading list.
And if my suggestion isn’t good enough :), you will have to agree with Guy Kawasaki,
“Rohit provides a goldmine of ideas and trends that will shape the future of marketing and product development. Read this book to get in front of the herd.”