Quotes from McKinsey
Trends towards 2015

The world's capital markets now enjoy unprecedented breadth and strength. Financial institutions routinely move trillions of dollars of assets—stocks, bonds, and other instruments—around the globe. Cross-border capital flows and foreign holdings of financial assets continue to grow rapidly, linking individual financial markets into an increasingly integrated global one.

One of them is simply that global capital markets are huge: we calculate that the world's financial assets now total more than $118 trillion and will exceed $200 trillion by 2010 if current trends persist. The stock of global financial assets has grown faster than the world's GDP.

MACROECONOMIC TRENDS
1. Centers of economic activity will shift profoundly, not just globally, but also regionally. As a consequence of economic liberalization, technological advances, capital market developments, and demographic shifts, the world has embarked on a massive realignment of economic activity.
Asia and USA on top.

2. Public-sector activities will balloon, making productivity gains essential. The unprecedented aging of populations across the developed world will call for new levels of efficiency and creativity from the public sector. Without clear productivity gains, the pension and health care burden will drive taxes to stifling proportions.
The adoption of proven private-sector approaches will likely become pervasive in the provision of social services in both the developed and the developing worlds.

3. The consumer landscape will change and expand significantly. Almost a billion new consumers will enter the global marketplace in the next decade as economic growth in emerging markets pushes them beyond the threshold level of $5,000 in annual household income.
And consumers, wherever they live, will increasingly have information about and access to the same products and brands.

SOCIAL AND ENVIRONMENTAL TRENDS
4. Technological connectivity will transform the way people live and interact. More transformational than technology itself is the shift in behavior that it enables. We work not just globally but also instantaneously. We are forming communities and relationships in new ways (indeed, 12 percent of US newlyweds last year met online). More than two billion people now use cell phones. We send nine trillion e-mails a year. We do a billion Google searches a day, more than half in languages other than English. For perhaps the first time in history, geography is not the primary constraint on the limits of social and economic organization.

5. The battlefield for talent will shift. Ongoing shifts in labor and talent will be far more profound than the widely observed migration of jobs to low-wage countries.
The 33 million university-educated young professionals in developing countries is more than double the number in developed ones. For many companies and governments, global labor and talent strategies will become as important as global sourcing and manufacturing strategies.

6. The role and behavior of big business will come under increasingly sharp scrutiny. As businesses expand their global reach, and as the economic demands on the environment intensify, the level of societal suspicion about big business is likely to increase.
The tenets of current global business ideology—for example, shareholder value, free trade, intellectual-property rights, and profit repatriation—are not understood, let alone accepted, in many parts of the world.
Business, particularly big business, will never be loved. It can, however, be more appreciated. Business leaders need to argue and demonstrate more forcefully the intellectual, social, and economic case for business in society and the massive contributions business makes to social welfare.

7. Demand for natural resources will grow, as will the strain on the environment. As economic growth accelerates—particularly in emerging markets—we are using natural resources at unprecedented rates. Oil demand is projected to grow by 50 percent in the next two decades, and without large new discoveries or radical innovations supply is unlikely to keep up.
The world's resources are increasingly constrained. Water shortages will be the key constraint to growth in many countries. And one of our scarcest natural resources—the atmosphere—will require dramatic shifts in human behavior to keep it from being depleted further.

BUSINESS AND INDUSTRY TRENDS
8. New global industry structures are emerging. In many industries, a barbell-like structure is appearing, with a few giants on top, a narrow middle, and then a flourish of smaller, fast-moving players on the bottom.

9. Management will go from art to science. Bigger, more complex companies demand new tools to run and manage them.
Long gone is the day of the "gut instinct" management style. Today's business leaders are adopting algorithmic decision-making techniques and using highly sophisticated software to run their organizations.

10. Ubiquitous access to information is changing the economics of knowledge. Knowledge is increasingly available and, at the same time, increasingly specialized.
Companies will need to learn how to leverage this new knowledge universe—or risk drowning in a flood of too much information.