What Comes After What Comes Next

"Gateway happened before it could build a mythology," Wacker says, "That's what's so cool about business now. You can go from zero to $5 billion overnight; it happens before you know who you are."

There's another reason for Wacker's role at Gateway. Last March, the company named Jim Taylor, 49, its senior vice president for global marketing. Wacker and Taylor have been intellectual soul mates since 1984 -- working, traveling, speaking, and writing together. Next spring, HarperBusiness will publish their first book, "The 500-Year Delta: What Comes After What Comes Next." The book is bursting with sweeping arguments and detailed predictions.

"We're at a point of absolute, positive, supreme discontinuity," Wacker proclaims. "Human beings were not built to process what we're going through now. Two generations ago people didn't move more than 50 miles away from where they were born. We were trained to have to memorize only 25 people's names in our life. Today if you live in New York City, you see 8,000 commercial messages a day. So I don't just study change. I study how change is changing -- the delta of the delta. That's what I'm trying to see."

What's most notable about Wacker is not just what he sees but how he looks. Wacker tracks global economics and culture with an unnatural obsessiveness. He reads and commissions in-depth market research. He spends his free time interpreting everything from commercials to comics. He's on the road 250 days a year -- and spends much of that time engaged in what he calls "observational research."

It's a dull term for a dazzling technique -- part science, part detective work, part performance art. Put simply, rather than observe it at a distance, Wacker goes undercover to experience it. He buses tables at Taco Bell, drives airport shuttle buses, escorts women past right-to-life protesters and into family-planning clinics.

Wacker experiences things from as many different angles as he can. At least once a year, he works as an undercover wrangler, accompanying outfitter Tom Heintz of Medicine Lake Outfitters on treks into the Montana mountains. This summer, Wacker's well-heeled guests included the vice chairman one of Wall Street's biggest investment banks. This high-powered executive had no idea the man tying up his horse and straightening his tent stakes works with many of the same corporate clients he does.

Likewise, New Yorkers passing through the George Washington Bridge bus terminal have no idea the panhandler they're straining to avoid is actually watching them. (Wacker doesn't let his observations interfere with fund-raising. "My one-day record is $62.14," he reports.)

Why would a highly paid futurist spend so much time in such bizarre, sometimes dangerous pursuits? "What's the most powerful force in the universe?" he asks rhetorically. "Lots of people think it's love. Einstein said it was compound interest. I think it's denial. It's so easy to get locked into seeing the world from the perspective of your particular engagement with it. I'm from the suburbs, an 'Aryan from Darien.' This research generates social empathy, an openness to perspectives other than my own. It's a reality check on my personal biases."

The television division of DreamWorks SKG sits in a glassy black building 27 floors above the Jurassic Park ride at Universal Studios. Wacker has been consulting with the high-profile entertainment startup since its creation two years ago. One of his ideas, which is being tested in Phoenix, is a game show called "Majority Rules." The show has two unusual qualities, both of which are classic Wacker. First, it's participative -- as part of the game, members of the studio audience vote on which contestants they think will answer correctly. Second, it's audacious -- Wacker wants DreamWorks to give away $1 million on every show.

Today, though, "Majority Rules" is not on the agenda. Wacker, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt, white shorts, and sandals, is in the office of Andy Fessel, an executive (DreamWorkers have no titles) who is laid back to the point of being virtually without a pulse. Fessel and his boss, Ken Solomon, both wear mandarin collar shirts and take copious notes as Watts offers his views on a late-night news show that's scheduled to debut in 1998. The show, cohosted by Maury Povich and Connie Chung, is being designed to compete head-to-head with ABC's popular "Nightline."

The way to have impact, he argues, is to build shows around the nine major forces pushing America forward: mobility, work, participation, romantic love, consensus materialism, winning, victimization, possibilization, leisure. "If you keep those nine building blocks up on a wall," he argues, "and see how specific topics relate to them, it will give you a frame for a show."