John Naisbitt

John Naisbitt (January 15, 1929 – April 8, 2021) was an American author and public speaker in the area of futures studies. His first book Megatrends: Ten New Directions Transforming Our Lives was published in 1982. It was the result of almost ten years of research. It was on The New York Times Best Seller list for two years, mostly as No. 1. Megatrends was published in 57 countries and sold more than 14 million copies.

Biography
John Naisbitt grew up in Glenwood, Utah and studied at Harvard, Cornell and Utah universities. He gained business experience working for IBM and Eastman Kodak. In the world of politics he was assistant to the Commissioner of Education under President John F. Kennedy and served as special assistant to HEW Secretary John Gardner during the Johnson administration. He left Washington in 1966 and joined Science Research Associates. In 1968, he founded his own company, the Urban Research Corporation. Naisbitt founded the Naisbitt China Institute, a non-profit, independent research institution studying the social, cultural and economic transformation of China located at Tianjin University. In 2009, Naisbitt published China's Megatrends, a book analyzing China's rise. He has been an adviser on agricultural development to the royal government of Thailand, former visiting fellow at Harvard University, visiting professor at Moscow State University, faculty member at Nanjing University in China, distinguished International Fellow at the Institute of Strategic and International Studies, Malaysia (the first non-Asian to hold this appointment), professor at Nankai University, Tianjin University of Finance and Economics, and a member of the advisory Board of the Asia Business School, Tianjin, and has been the recipient of 15 honorary doctorates in the humanities, technology and science. John Naisbitt and his wife Doris were based in Vienna and Tianjin.

Naisbitt died on April 8, 2021, at his secondary residence in Velden am Wörther See, Austria.

On social and political thought
Although Naisbitt has not written an explicitly political book, in 1982 his Megatrends book he expressed early enthusiasm for radical centrist politics. The book states, in bolded type, "The political left and right are dead; all the action is being generated by a radical center."