One of the world's leading futurists looks at what's ahead for the industry
by Catherine Lerner
As much as the day-to-day issues of running a business
play on your mind, it is vital to take time out to
ponder what the future has in store and how you
should be ready to respond to it. This year's IHRSA
European Congress gives you just such an opportunity
as leading futurist Hamish McRae shares his insight
on the World in 2020.
Predictions about the future are often regarded as
slightly extremist and a touch unreliable, but they
fascinate us nonetheless. And, because businesses need
to be able to identify and anticipate trends, many of us
have to sift the sound from the silly to form our own
conclusions. The job has been made easier, though, for
anyone who follows the musings of Hamish McRae, an
economist, former editor of Euromoney, a columnist
with Fortune magazine, and financial editor of The
Guardian before joining The Independent newspaper
in the UK in 1989 where he is now associate editor.
He collated his views in a book, The World in 2020,
published in 1994, which received excellent reviews.
Now, 10 years on, he is still earning a comfortable
living travelling the world elaborating on his first
comments. Needless to say, he has been able to continue
on the international speaking circuit because
his predictions have stacked up, year on year.
CBE: Why did you decide to contribute your views on the
debate about the future?
HM: When I looked at the books that were available,
I thought they were all a bit wacky. As an economist,
I wanted to look at the future in a cooler, more
sensible way.
All companies have to plan for the future, but what
information do they have available to them to be
well-informed? What are the big trends we can
identify about the future? What are the economic
implications of those? What wider political
assumptions can we make as a result?
The future puzzles and intrigues us all. The
trick, if you are running a business, is to identify
the trends that you know something about,
and to be honest about the things that you
know nothing about. The trends that you know about
you can plan for. For the things that you know nothing
about, and can know nothing about, you have to try
to create a strategy that is nimble. It's as important
to know what you don't know as it is to know what
you do know.
CBE: So, what can you be sure about in the future
for Europe?
HM: The first place to start is with demographics. Most
obviously, Europe is getting older. With Japan, Europe is
not just the oldest society on earth in terms of the proportion of people of retirement age
and over-it is actually the oldest society
that humankind has ever known. And
it is getting older.
CBE: What does that mean for our industry?
HM: Older values will become more
important. Older people have more of
the votes so they will have more and
more of the political power. The values
that they bring to a society will tend to
dominate, so we won't have politicians
hunting to lure the youth in; we'll have
politicians wanting to hang on to their
older voters. And that affects every
industry in Europe. It affects very
obviously things like pensions, but also
the leisure industry, which has got
an identification with the young. Sport
isn't something that is done only by
15-year-olds at school and 23-year-old
brilliant athletes; it is actually something
we all need to do to keep ourselves
functioning as we grow older.
CBE: What do we need to do to address
the older population?
HM: The intriguing question is whether
the 'new' old will be the same as the
'old' old. The next generation of people
as they age will be different to the
previous generation, but they will not
be exactly the same people as they
were when they were 15. So part of the
trick is to think through the social
consequences of the ageing trend-
what it might mean to a society and
then how does a business cope with it.
The workforce, for example, will
need to employ older people. As
employers, we will need to think about
whether a 55-year-old will want to be
greeted by a 25-year-old or a 75-year-old?
How do you train people who are
older? How do you use them in a way
that enhances the performance and
comfort of the whole operation? You
don't do this in obvious ways. You have
the 25-year-olds training the 75-year-olds
and the 75-year-olds training the
45-year-olds. The 'new' olds are much
fitter than the 'old' olds; your staff can
be an advertisement for the benefits
of keeping fit and healthy.
CBE: What action needs to be taken
to encourage people to look after
themselves better?
HM: I think we are in the early stages of
a general mood of people taking more
responsibility for themselves. I don't
have a huge amount of evidence of it-
it is more intuitive than evidential.
There is still a blame culture going on;
in America you can sue Coca-Cola for
giving you a drink that is packed with
sugar and so will make you fat. But you
don't actually have to drink it.
Ultimately what you eat is your final
decision. You don't have a hamburger
because the government tells you to.
The rise in obesity has raised awareness
of these issues.
There is also more interest in
healthy lifestyles, and you can see lots
of evidence of that. You can see the
growth of health clubs as one result.
Developers don't build them because
they have a profound belief in the
benefits of a health club for a community;
they do it because they are going
to make money: it is what people want.
And it's not just organised health
clubs, it is greater provision of leisure
facilities. Look at the greater interest in
the Olympic Games. It is a much larger
event now than it was 15 years ago.
Outdoor pursuits are tending to take up
more time, too, and these could just
be birdwatching; they don't have to
be strenuous pursuits.
CBE: Can we afford to wait? Shouldn't
initiatives be put in place to increase the
pace of change?
HM: I don't think we should be Stalinist
about it. I would hate to have all the
escalators taken out of the tube and
everyone made to walk up and down-
the sort of exercise equivalent to not
being allowed to light up a cigarette in
a pub. What you do instead, is lead.
What creates change is social attitudes.
There is always an interactive
between what people vote for and ask
politicians to do-the top down-and
what they themselves do as individuals
or in communities-the bottom up. If
you look at what came first, changing
attitudes to smoking or the government's
lead against it, the answer is
they came together.
You can see a little bit of the same
attitude towards smoking taking place
with food. Up to now, a lot has been
tokenism, with food labelling and
so on. That's useless. What's needed
is more wider, substantial change
in attitudes.
You can see governments starting to
lean and you can see wise companies,
good supermarket groups, starting to
lean in the same direction. And then
you get a tipping point when everything
starts to move more sharply.
In terms of exercise, I think that we
are in the very, very early stages of a
change in attitude. Actually, people
walk quite a lot and the amount of time
people spend walking hasn't changed
that much.
CBE: We may be at the beginning of
social change, but can you point to any
examples of nations which are more
advanced in this process than others?
HM: There are lots of interesting experiments
taking place. For example, in
Copenhagen, a much higher proportion
of the workforce cycle to work now
than 25 years ago, and that has been
achieved through education and also in
building cycle lanes, a physical recon-
figuration of the city. That is a specific
example of a public policy which was
designed largely to reduce pollution
rather than make people healthier, but
it had the side effect of making people
healthier. You can even say that something
is happening here in London with
the congestion charge-people are biking
more and they are walking more.
Some countries are taking more
steps than others. Places like Scandinavia
and in the USA, California, for
example: a healthy lifestyle is a theme
of both those societies.
CBE: How can other countries follow
these examples?
HM: The first thing to do is realise you
have a problem. I think we will now
see all sorts of experiments over the
next 20 or 30 years trying to make people
lead more healthy lifestyles, and
some will work and some will fail. It is
quite surprising, but we won't know
what will work until it works; that is
the fascinating thing about all social
advance. You don't know what is
important until you try it.
I think social change happens
because a government tries to reinforce
a trend that is already taking
place. When governments spit in the
wind, they fail. And there are all sorts
of examples of governments trying to
get people to do something which run
against the way societies work. They're
a waste of time. On the other hand,
when you try to reinforce something
that people want to do but there are
some blockages which the state can
remove, then it starts to make sense.
And commercial organisations will zip
in and help. Governments by themselves
can't do very much, but the interaction
between the private sector and government
is wonderful.
CBE: Should the government provide
financial inducements, then, to encourage
this interaction?
HM: I don't know the answer to that.
Tax incentives have been hugely disappointing
in other areas. Look at pensions.
The incentives are enormous and
yet people don't save nearly enough.
But tax incentives to encourage people
to buy their own homes in Britain were
equally enormous and were successful.
Sometimes tax incentives work and
sometimes they don't. I am somewhat
sceptical. I think that insurance incentives
on the other hand may be quite
effective. There are lower premium
rates for careful drivers; why not have
lower life insurance rates for people
who are more healthy and adopt a
healthier lifestyle? That sort of thing
might happen.
If you look at the US, there is
tremendous emphasis among health
management companies on trying to
stop people getting ill in the first place.
Ultimately, that is what a health care
system should do. It shouldn't be
patching people up when things go
wrong, as is done in the National
Health Service. But it is not very easy to
convert theory into practice. Paradoxically,
it is actually easier in a pure
insurance situation than in a state
monopolistic provision. If you are in
insurance, it is paramount that your
customers don't get ill because it will
cost you if they do. In the UK, our
system is geared towards fixing people
when they get ill rather than preventing
them from becoming ill, so we do
not have the ideal structure.
CBE: You refer to a concern about the
environment in the future-that increasingly
we will all become more aware of
how we are impacting our local and
global environment. How does this affect
the health and fitness industry?
HM: There are certain types of industries
that, whatever they do, are going
to be thought of as nasty industries-
the chemical industries, for example.
We all want to have paint on our houses
but we may not want to have a huge
manufacturing plant next door to us.
On the other hand, the whole leisure
industry, and most particulary the
health club end of it, is an industry
which is naturally positioned to be
environmentally sound.
If we live in a society that will
become more concerned about the
environment, and I am pretty sure we
will, for all sorts of reasons, that means
that the whole of the health industry,
but particularly the club industry, is
brilliantly positioned to be a nice industry
that people will want to associate
with. It will be interesting to see how
the industry can not just package itself
but play on a universal concern about
the environment.
It can achieve this in very practical
ways like getting people to walk more,
to use their cars less. It seems odd to
me to encourage people to drive to a
health club only to cycle in a room
when they get there. If you are really
concerned with getting people to exercise
more, why not have people bicycle
to work or bicycle for leisure, and have
the health club industry work towards
getting more bicycle lanes. There is a
social outreach responsibility that I
think the industry can have and help
mould a better society.
CBE: What have you observed of the
health club market?
HM: The wonderful thing is that it is
innovative, and it is growing very fast.
Sometimes it has growing pains; large
companies have run into trouble
because they have grown too fast and
have added on too much cost. But, overall,
the sector has hugely successful
business growth. I can't think off the
top of my head of any other industries
that have expanded faster in the last 20
years, electronics aside.
I would like to see it finding a way
to offer more provision to the disadvantaged.
I'd like to see more outreach,
more training that isn't 'come into our
glitzy gym and use our expensive kit'
to get fit, but 'come in once a month,
we'll weigh you and test you, then go
away and walk to work every morning
instead of taking the bus, take the
stairs instead of the escalator, do this.'
I think the industry would do itself a
great deal of good. I am sure many
health clubs do this already.
CBE: Are there cultural barriers preventing
health club operators within
Europe from learning from each other?
HM: The barriers we need to worry
about are within countries rather than
without. The barriers between the professional
Swiss, professional French,
professional Spaniard are much less
than those between a professional Brit
and a manual worker Brit.
There is a great opportunity within
Europe to learn from each other, and
there will be things that are developed
in Scandinavia or Spain or wherever
which should be applied in Germany or
France or Greece.
And in health clubs there are really
no cultural barriers at all.
CBE: What do you hope the industry will
gain from your presentation?
HM: I would like them to realise and
celebrate the success of the industry-
not just in financial and growth terms,
but in helping people lead better lives,
healthier lives. I think that is something
to be proud of and celebrated. The
industry should be pleased about that
and feel good about it.
The second thing is to realise that
currently the industry is really only
scratching the surface. The need for
an older population to lead healthier
lifestyles is huge, and there is a great
opportunity to play a role just trying to
help old Europe be healthier.
