Futurist Glen Hiemstra offers this advice to executives who fear the future: don't wait for the future to happen to you; instead, change it while you still have time and profit from it.

Delivering the closing address to the Fall 2006 Professional Forum of IAMC, author and lecturer Hiemstra focused on "what businesses and individuals need to know to shape their futures."

He also issued a call to action. "The opportunities have never been greater, the challenges more daunting," he said. "Your image of the future can actually shape your future. The Microsoft leadership team spent 20 percent of their time thinking about and developing shared perspectives on the long-range future. A long-range and wide-angle view allows you to see opportunities that others do not."

For example, the visiting scholar at the Human Interface Technology Lab at the University of Washington said, consider the four trend categories that business leaders should monitor very closely and carefully: demographic shifts, technology advances, economic, and the environment and energy.

Hiemstra said that, with sound long-range planning, any business can take advantage of these trends and profit from emerging market opportunities.

He cited the need by corporations to retain their aging workers rather than jettison them into early retirement. "In America today, approximately 10 percent of our population is over 65. The one exception is Florida, where 20 percent of their citizens are over 65," he noted. "By 2025, there will be 27 Floridas. Today, companies are trying to figure out how to get rid of workers over 55 when they should be thinking about how to keep them. Retirement in the traditional sense will be radically changed."

Older workers often represent the best knowledge capital and the most willing talent pool in a company, the futurist said. Eliminate them, he said, and you eliminate growth prospects you haven't even discovered yet.

At the other end of the demographic scale, Hiemstra said, are the workers he called the "digital natives" — young people who have been raised on iPods, cell phones, online video games, global awareness, web surfing and multi-tasking.

If business leaders would watch how these young workers learn, grow and develop essential skill sets, the leaders would learn lessons that translate into tangible business success, the speaker noted.

In his book, Turning the Future into Revenue, Hiemstra writes, "If you have children of this generation, you know what I mean. Watch them as they constantly multi-task, always connected via their cell phones and instant messaging, notice how quickly they seek and obtain information, notice how they approach buying customer goods, notice how they seek out the ATM and avoid going inside a bank, notice how they purchase virtually everything with electronic money, even a $3 latte."

The problem, Hiemstra says, is that too many companies are treating their customers as though time has stood still. Those companies will soon be in big trouble because they will not have learned how to incorporate the digital generation into their work force and their customer base.

The futurist said the biggest opportunities for industrial companies, however, will come in the closely linked fields of energy and the environment. Sustainable buildings, low-emission factories, climate-friendly production processes and vehicles, and alternative methods of energy generation are not just the wave of the future; they are happening right now, he said.

Hiemstra penned an entire chapter in his book on "How to Profit from the Next Energy Wave." Stating that "alternatives are not alternatives anymore," the author predicted that the biggest economic gains will be realized in the fields of biodiesel fuel, ethanol, solar cells, wind energy, ocean power, hydrogen, non-hydrogen fuel cells and nuclear energy.

"The convergence of the end of cheap oil and need for viable alternatives to be developed quickly combine to create perhaps an unparalleled opportunity," he writes. "In 2005 the world spent about $4 trillion on oil. Imagine the investment and growth potential if a portion of this spending is shifted to nano-solar rooftops, wind turbines, various fuel cell technologies, biomass fuels, hydrogen capture and storage, and so on."