What Comes After What Comes Next

Wacker could talk for hours on any one of these, but there are other items on the agenda. So he discusses just a few of the nine forces. One aspect of the new mobility, he says, is the urbanization of rural America. "We're going to have a big fight on our hands as people like us move into places like Bozeman, Montana, Des Moines, Iowa, and Traverse City, Michigan. We're bringing our urban-dweller lifestyle to these rural communities, and there are going be conflicts."

He explains that two of the driving forces, work and leisure, are becoming harder to distinguish: "This country has a huge mythology surrounding the work ethic. Now we're creating a leisure ethic. The work ethic isn't going away, but it is adjusting itself to accommodate leisure. People take their work home and their leisure to the office. So many people are bringing their pets to work, I'm telling companies they'd better start pet ranches."

Then Wacker talks about love: "People are redefining love and asking what it represents in their lives. Love is becoming not just an internal satisfaction but an external satisfaction. The number-one status symbol in America today is a long marriage."

Moments later, Wacker is in a DreamWorks conference room pointing to a slide. Entitled "True Freedoms," the slide contains four infinitives: To Go; To Be; To Do; To Know. The slide is really a shorthand version of the argument at the center of "The 500-Year Delta." As he walks the executives through the slide, he takes them on a tour of his thinking.

The world, Wacker says, is entering a period of cultural schizophrenia. At a material level, people have never been more alike. Thirty years ago, a visitor to middle-class homes in Tokyo, Paris, and Des Moines would have been impressed by the culturally based differences in objects and artifacts. Today they'd see the same objects in all three places. People want the same things: their own home with separate bedrooms, a dining room with a table, a kitchen with a refrigerator, stove, and microwave. The planet, Wacker says, has arrived at a "uniform global definition of stuff."

This material uniformity, Wacker says, has launched a countervailing search for intellectual and spiritual diversity -- a drive to stand out from the crowd based on personal interests, and to find others who share your views. Wacker says the explosion of the Web, email discussion groups, and chat rooms are all part of the same phenomenon: the rise of what he and Taylor call "communities of strangers" -- people linked electronically, based on identity and aspirations rather than geography or social proximity. These communities, he says, will be the next big driver of social organization. "Your three best friends," he predicts, "will be people you've never met in person."

There's no formal training to become a futurist, but Watts Wacker seems born into the role. His early years were characterized by two dominant realities -- an immersion in marketing, and a roller-coaster journey through life itself. Wacker grew up in Birmingham, Michigan, the son of an ad-agency owner who sold his business to Leo Burnett. At age nine, he traveled with his dad to meet the new owners in Chicago. It was there, he remembers, that he encountered the first ad slogan that showed him the power of the medium -- that famous campaign that urged beer drinkers to "Go for the Gusto."

Wacker's parents divorced when he was eleven. His mother spent much of his childhood in and out of psychiatric hospitals. His father, an alcoholic, became addicted to prescription drugs. At one stage, Wacker seized legal control of his father's finances and helped him into recovery.

Wacker's career has always revolved around product innovation and ideas. He started in new-product development at Schering-Plough, the pharmaceuticals company, then worked for a Philip Morris think tank. He spent three years at Kenner Products, where he negotiated the licensing of Star Wars toys, and eventually became vice president of marketing. He spent a formative decade at Yankelovich Partners -- where he succeeded superstar futurist John Naisbitt and first met up with Jim Taylor.

Wacker and Taylor began working together shortly after Taylor joined scandal-plagued E.F. Hutton. His job was to rehabilitate the firm, and he adopted a high-risk strategy. "We said the way to dig ourselves out of this whole was to become the first company that really understood how people felt socially, as opposed to materially, about money," Taylor recalls. Hutton hired Yankelovich to study "the meaning of money," and Taylor and Wacker started collaborating. "Watts was the key guy on that study, and it was a great study," he says.