Walker Webcast: Dr. Mauro Guillen Previews the Very Different World of 2030

By Paul Bubny

On this week’s Walker Webcast, Walker & Dunlop CEO Willy Walker set the stage for his conversation with Dr. Mauro Guillen, author of “2030: How Today’s Biggest Trends Will Collide And Reshape The Future Of Everything,” by referencing a pair of songs from 1971. Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” a reworking of an old blues song, finds the narrator and his community beset by immediate crises. John Lennon’s “Imagine” asks the listener to envision a world very different from today’s.

As in the Zeppelin track, rising water levels are one of the problems facing the world of 2021. (Another is its opposite: an issue with water supply in key population centers.) At the same time, Guillen’s book charts these challenges and suggests solutions, while also projecting how technological advances and socioeconomic trends will reshape global society within the next decade—and illustrating the opportunities that will arise along the way.

By 2030, Guillen predicts, China’s middle class will have more purchasing power than their U.S. counterparts. The preferences of consumers in China and other emerging markets increasingly will shape global brands’ product offerings as a result.

Another evolving demographic trend has long-term implications for the financial services sector. Within the next nine years, Guillen predicts, women will hold more global wealth than men, and this portends changes in the investing landscape.

Between now and 2030, there’s a wealth of opportunities for organizations that can envision how to capitalize on them through seeing the relationships among trends. Guillen uses the term “lateral thinking” to describe this thought process.

“Lateral thinking is all about connecting the dots,” Guillen, professor of international management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, said on Wednesday’s webcast.

Noting that he and Walker had discussed numerous emerging and ongoing trends on the webcast, he added, “The point of lateral thinking is that all of these trends feed into one another.”

It’s how long-established companies such as Philips and General Electric realized that light bulb production had become commoditized and, with an increasingly large cohort of consumers age 60 and above, there was an opportunity to shift product lines to medical equipment. It’s also how the more recently established Airbnb tied together demographic trends to its advantage.

COVID-19 was still months away from emerging when Guillen researched and wrote “2030,” yet Airbnb’s response to the pandemic has also been an example of lateral thinking, he said Wednesday. By pivoting from a focus on long-distance travel to more local getaways, the company has restored revenues essentially to pre-pandemic levels.

The current pandemic is hardly the first to occur, yet Guillen noted a key difference between this and prior global health crises. “COVID is a big accelerator of pre-existing trends” whereas earlier pandemics such as the 1918 Spanish flu stopped history in its tracks. He joked that maybe he ought to have titled the book “2028,” since COVID has accelerated the timeline for a number of his predictions.

On-demand replays of the Feb. 3 webcast are available by clicking here and through Walker & Dunlop’s Driven by Insight podcast series.

For comments, questions or concerns, please contact Paul Bubny