Something to Look Forward To

This month’s issue actually signals the start of 2007 for us since it’s the first one put together and printed in the New Year. As our magazine moves into its 52nd year in publication, you’ll see a combination of new and familiar things. We’ll still have our signature Top 250, Black Book, Top Landowners, and Best Places to Work issues plus a second year of Fittest CEOs this fall, and our new “Small Business Success Stories” in this issue. We’re also renovating our Web site to add both daily news and social networking components, and we expect to have that live about the time this issue reaches you. This is also the year in which we commence, in partnership with the Hawaii Institute for Public Affairs, a series of forums throughout the year on sustainability and the Hawaii business community. Those things, along with several new ad campaigns and events, give us a lot to look forward to as a magazine.

There are other things to look forward to as well. When I got together with some friends for breakfast recently, we started talking about health and exercise and, inevitably for people at our point in the life cycle, which of us was on medication for high blood pressure, who was taking Lipitor, and which of our aging parents were in need of the most care. I mentioned the new technology coming in the near future like the nano-robots that’ll be injected into our blood systems to hunt down and destroy cancer cells, and the super-Lipitor-like drug that will not only keep our cholesterol count at the right levels but will strip the deposits right off our veins and arteries. Life expectancies will take a giant leap beyond what our parents now enjoy, and if the prospect of 90 and 100 year olds still driving doesn’t make you yearn for the mass transit rail system, nothing will.

We also talked about our children and what they were doing in their schools and sports, who was home from college, and the like. A couple of us had had lunch with the son of another friend who will be graduating from college this year talked to him about life after college, and we were intrigued to find out that his passion is making short films of the miniature variety found on YouTube. He wants to make it a career. We encouraged him in his interest, for although we were only casually acquainted with the burgeoning Web video industry, it didn’t take a genius to realize that it was the wave of the future for the iPod generation.

It was exciting to think of his prospects for the future, but it was also sobering to confront the reality of trying to give advice to an eager, bright young person about a future being shaped by technological advances and the forces of globalization that will be unlike anything we experienced or can currently imagine. So as we ate our oatmeal or eggs with brown rice, we reflected on the changes coming in the New Year and the challenges of the more distant future that we’ll be sharing with and then passing on to our children. For better or worse, it’s something we have to look forward to.

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