Faith Popcorn

"The biggest lesson I learned from Faith was to ask questions! Cultural curiosity is the key to prediction. The ability to understand 'the why,' even when the consumer doesn’t, unlocks powerful insights."--Tiffany Vasilcik, from a post on the Innovation Excellence web site, 10/24/12 To debut the Women of the Year blog this 2013 New Year's Day, I thought it would be interesting to look at the work of the futurist, Faith Popcorn. Faith must be a reassuring name for the corporations who hire her and her consultants at BrainReserve, the firm she started in 1974, to predict what consumers will be doing and buying next. The message above from a decade-long acolyte is simple, the key to success in any endeavor, whether we undertake it now or in the future. In THE POPCORN REPORT, published in 1991, she predicted we'd own our own android. Close, though not with quite the value she imagined (she thought we'd have androids to actually do physical work while what we have at present is a phone/toy that distracts us from occupations more worth our time). The firm's predictions for a "she-change" in 2012 certainly painted a glowing picture of "a new era of productivity and peace," thanks to how we would "rely on compassion more than competition...more innovation than invasion" (from FaithPopcorn.com). Let me think...ummmm...women's leaps forward in 2012...there must be something. Ah yes, Marissa Mayer's new job as CEO of Yahoo! just before she gave birth to her first child is encouraging...that's one. And then I see the death from gang rape of a young Indian woman who'd moved to the city for more opportunity, the shooting of an Afghani schoolgirl by the Taliban for her outspoken support of girls' education, Kathryn Bigelow's portrait of the female government operative who pursued Osama bin Laden for ten years to target him for death (I'm not complaining about the outcome!), and the lack of a credible female candidate for President or VP as proof that we're still a world modeled more on Maggie Thatcher than Mother Teresa.