John Naisbitt Quotes

#1. The new leader is a facilitator, not an order giver.

John Naisbitt

#2. Leadership involves finding a parade and getting in front of it.

John Naisbitt

#3. If you have to be right, you put yourself in a hedged lane, but once you experience the power of not having to be right, you will feel like you are walking across open fields, the perspective wide and your feet free to take any turn.

John Naisbitt

#4. The more high technology around us, the more the need for human touch ... HighTech/High Touch. The principle symbolizes the need for balance between our physical and spiritual reality.

John Naisbitt

#5. We have for the first time an economy based on a key resource [Information] that is not only renewable, but self- generating. Running out of it is not a problem, but drowning in it is.

John Naisbitt

#6. In a world that is constantly changing, there is no one subject or set of subjects that will serve you for the foreseeable future, let alone for the rest of your life. The most important skill to acquire now is learning how to learn.

John Naisbitt

#7. We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human race.

John Naisbitt

#8. Lawyers are like beavers: They get in the mainstream and dam it up.

John Naisbitt

#9. It is in the nature of human beings to bend information in the direction of desired conclusions.

John Naisbitt

#10. I was sure we would never see the adoption of the Euro. Countries giving up their currencies for a common tender was, it seemed to me, completely out of tune with currency being a carrier of people's cultural identity, celebrating national heroes and events, as it had been for hundreds of years.

John Naisbitt

#11. Intuition becomes increasingly valuable in the new information society precisely because there is so much data.

John Naisbitt

#12. Value is what people are willing to pay for it.

John Naisbitt

#13. In their search for quality, people seem to be looking for permanency in a time of change.

John Naisbitt

#14. Learning how to learn is the most precious thing we have in life.

John Naisbitt

#15. The big-business mergers and the big-labour mergers have the appearance of dinosaurs mating.

John Naisbitt

#16. The most exciting breakthroughs of the 21st century will not occur because of technology but because of an expanding concept of what it means to be human.

John Naisbitt

#17. Almost all change is evolutionary, not revolutionary ... expectations always travel at higher speeds.

John Naisbitt

#18. Whenever a new technology is introduced into society, there must be a counterbalancing human response - that is, high touch - or the technology is rejected ... We must learn to balance the material wonders of technology with the spiritual demands of our human nature.

John Naisbitt

#19. We are shifting from a managerial society to an entrepreneurial society.

John Naisbitt

#20. Countries don't create economies. It is entrepreneurs and companies that create and revitalize economies. The role of the governments should be to create a nourishing environment for entrepreneurs and companies to flourish, not to get in the way of economic development.

John Naisbitt

#21. We created the hierarchical, pyramidal, managerial system because we needed it to keep track of people and things people did; with the computer to keep track, we can restructure our institutions horizontally.

John Naisbitt

#22. Strategic planning is worthless - unless there is first a strategic vision.

John Naisbitt

#23. In the Marines, I was stunned, absolutely stunned, at everything around me, at what the world looked like.

John Naisbitt

#24. Trends, like horses, are easier to ride in the direction they are going.

John Naisbitt

#25. The future is embedded in the present.

John Naisbitt

#26. We are drowning in information but starved for knowledge.

John Naisbitt

#27. In sales, as in medicine, a prescription before diagnosis is a mistake in the arts.

John Naisbitt

#28. The more technology we introduce into society, the more people will aggregate, will want to be with other people: movies, rock concerts, shopping.

John Naisbitt

#29. Small business, right down to the individual can beat big, bureaucratic companies ten times out of ten.

John Naisbitt

#30. America is a bottom-up society, where new trends and ideas begin in cities and local communities ... My colleagues and I have studied this great country by reading its newspapers. We have discovered that trends are generated from the bottom up.

John Naisbitt

#31. The most reliable way to forecast the future is to try to understand the present.

John Naisbitt

#32. The bigger the world economy, the more powerful its smallest player.

John Naisbitt

#33. In an information society, education is no mere amenity; it is the prime tool for growing people and profits.

John Naisbitt

#34. In the network model, rewards come by empowering others, not by climbing over them. If you work in a hierarchy, you may not want to climb to its top.

John Naisbitt

#35. One of the best kept secrets in America is that people are aching to make a commitment, if they only had the freedom and environment in which to do so.

John Naisbitt