In two previous blockbuster international best-sellers, John Naisbitt comprehensively identified the major trends that have swept through every sector of our world in the last fifteen years: from the globalization of the economy to the surging impact of technological innovation to the renewed power of culture in our lives. Now we confront a new pulse of change, a Global Paradox that will surely transform our lives:. The larger the system, the smaller and more powerful and important the parts.

Countries and companies are deconstructing into vital, smaller and smaller units. Multinational corporations are dramatically changing the way they do business or falling by the wayside. Empires are crumbling while looser economic alliances are on the rise. Nationalist movements in Quebec, Scotland, and throughout the former Soviet Bloc suddenly have a new, unprecedented vitality.

In Global Paradox, John Naisbitt builds a powerful instrument of comprehension from this one profound and vital insight about the seemingly chaotic changes that appear to grip our world.

The Paradox, as he sees it, is powered by the explosive developments in telecommunications which are the driving forces simultaneously creating the huge global economy and multiplying and empowering its parts. The Global Paradox is funded by the largest and fastest-growing industry in the world - tourism. Tourism is the face-to-face corollary of the communications revolution.

Tourism creates infrastructures and can lift Third World economies; tourism incites our interest in other cultures and tribes - gives them validity, makes us want to visit them. The force shaking the foundations of huge economic and political structures is this same tribalism: The more universal we become, the more tribal we act. This tribalism will bring hundreds, perhaps thousands, of new countries into existence and will empower thousands of diverse, tribally affiliated groups.

For the Global Paradox, China is the test case. Central economic planning got China nowhere. Now the individual entrepreneurs of China are swiftly moving in the direction of becoming the world's largest economy.

Founded on these fundamental principles, Global Paradox offers a glimpse of the near-term future: the likely winners and losers in the global marketplace, the sectors of growth and stagnation in the world economy, the new rules that will soon determine standards of political and business behavior from Tokyo to New York to Sydney, to Santiago and Shanghai, to Kuala Lumpur and all points in between.

Global Paradox is a noteworthy direction for John Naisbitt: a single conceptual breakthrough that applies a strikingly sharp vision to seemingly disparate trends in many areas of our lives. In the years and months to come, no informed reader can afford to ignore its awesome vision of the opportunities and challenges presented to nations, businesses, and individuals at millennium's end.