My advice is don't use technology primarily to lower costs. Use technology to create new, effective ways of touching the market and creating new businesses and if you do that right, the cost savings will come.

I've actually tried not to call myself a futurist for the last 25 years. I prefer "forecaster," but people call me a futurist, and it doesn't really bother me.

We tend to use a new technology to do an old task more efficiently. We pave the cow paths.

When everybody else is in a down market is focusing on what they're doing wrong, instead focus on what you should be doing differently, it may be that what you did in the past was perfectly right. It is possible to do all the right things in business and still have a business crisis because of what's happening in the external environment. And if you start focusing on mistakes only, you're going to miss opportunities.

Any thinking person is qualified to be a forecaster, and in fact, everybody does it every day.

Take cyberspace as an example. We had this wonderful utopian vision of a new home for the mind. What we've reaped isn't cyberspace. It's cyberbia. It's this vast, bland wasteland of vulgar people and trivial ideas and pictures of half-naked starlets. But despite all the uncertainty, has there ever been a more fascinating moment to be alive?

You don't want to rely on an expert to tell you what lies ahead.