A S S E S S I N G    T H E    2 0 T H     C E N T U R Y

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1990-2000: Super Projects,
True Global Systems and Futurism
By the time the last decade of the 20th century began, it had become obvious that the population explosion witnessed during the second half of the century would continue well into century 21. Conservative forecasters predicted that, in the absence of an effective program for managing the world's population, the new growth in the next 10 years would total at least 1 billion.

For those in the productive sectors, this outlook posed a truly awesome challenge. It meant that they had to provide food, shelter, clothing and essential services for another billion people at a time when resources were strained to serve the existing population.

Obviously, heroic measures would be needed. It would be necessary to think and plan big, very big. The world would need thousands of new manufacturing facilities and the infrastructure to support them.

This was the background that influenced planners in the latter part of the 20th century to think in terms of very large projects. They were challenged to build new wonders of the world -- not monuments, but useful facilities to meet global needs.

This brought in a new era of large-scale construction. Global "super projects," each costing billions of dollars, became numerous. We identified more than 1,500 projects in various stages of planning, feasibility analysis and construction. There was so much interest in the management of such huge undertakings that we established the World Development Federation to conduct an annual conference for project sponsors.

One of the things we learned in studying super projects was that they typically take a long time to develop. Some were notoriously slow. It was some time around the eighth century that the Emperor Charlemagne, for example, proposed to connect the Rhine River system with the Danube and began digging a canal. Work was interrupted. They didn't finish it. Then, several times in the interim years, work was done. But it was just in the early 1990s that the Rhine-Danube Canal project was finished. Today barge traffic flows from the Atlantic through Europe to the Black Sea.

Another example: 200 years ago Napoleon proposed building a tunnel under the English Channel to connect the mainland with the United Kingdom. That idea was finally implemented, and the "Chunnel" was opened in the 1990s.

The completion of these two links showed what the world could do when people invested their energy and resources in useful and productive ways rather than in global wars.

Significantly, the decade of the 1990s saw the beginning of development of true global systems. Whereas most large projects had in the past been built to serve a particular city or area, new projects were launched to serve the world. We believe this to be the beginning of development of world systems for communications, transportation, energy, water, environmental enhancement and other vital needs.

The leader in true global systems was universal communications. There was a step in this direction during the Desert Storm operation in the Middle East. Almost every global leader and millions of global citizens watched the war on the same CNN TV screen. We had a system that permitted people around the world to watch a major global event as it happened.

Also during Desert Storm we had the first widespread application of the global positioning system (GPS). This was the satellite positioning system used by the military to position tanks in the desert. After the war commercial applications were introduced and quickly adopted.

As soon as they were available, I bought a GPS unit for my airplane. Having spent most of my life flying airplanes without sophisticated navigation equipment, it was quite a revelation to put in a little black box that would enable me, for example, to sit on the ramp at Key West, Fla., and punch in the code for Cancun, Mexico, across the Gulf of Mexico, wait a few seconds while the set locked on a few satellites, then have the screen tell me, for example, that it was 364 nautical miles (582.4 km.) on a heading of 242°, and my time en route would be two hours and 31 minutes.

It was truly amazing. As I approached the runway at Cancun on that particular day, I could see the numbers clicking down, telling me I was .9 of a mile out, then .8, then .7, and so on right down to the end of the runway. Think how important that is in navigating across remote areas in the Arctic, in parts of Asia and in the interior of Africa and South America, where no ground-based radio facilities exist.

During this same time we saw the World Wide Web emerge -- one of the most significant developments in communication in the history of mankind. The Web permits people almost anywhere in the world to access information provided by thousands of sources. It is already an information service bigger and better than any library, and it is still in its infancy.

Even so, the biggest breakthrough was in the field of point-to-point global communications. This was made possible by the development of portable Earth stations. At first, they were reduced to a size you could carry in a suitcase. Then they came down to briefcase size. No doubt they will soon be the size of the two-way wrist radio worn by comic strip character Dick Tracy in the 1950s.

By mid-1990 it was possible in theory to carry your portable Earth station to the middle of the Sahara Desert and communicate with somebody sitting in an outrigger canoe in the lagoon at Bora Bora. This was one of the fantastic developments of the 1990s that would lead to the true global systems of the next century.

Another facet of this globalization was the improvement of business climates. Many nations entered into the competition to attract new industries, new investment and new jobs. Companies had more options -- they could select areas with better government. Many nations that previously had pursued communist and socialist policies in setting up government-owned enterprises turned to privatization in order to improve efficiency. They, too, wanted to attract outside investors, and they had to review and revise their business climate.

Of course, the business community noted and closely followed these changes in the global order and in global systems. As a result, the development of a global corporate strategy was no longer an exercise for just a few huge conglomerates -- it became a necessity for tens of thousands of firms large and small.

These companies had to take an interest in futurism not as a topic for cocktail conversation, but as a part of their business planning process. The forecasting of future events had become something to be taken very seriously.