Other articles by Cecil Johnson:

'Executricks' a guide to how to retire while still holding down that job Buffett, other business figures are profiled in splendid anthology 'Three Moves Ahead: What Chess Can Teach You About Business (Even If You've Never Played)' Markets often sense world shifts before so-called experts Success in business, like gambling, a matter of boosting luck Organizations can resemble 'tribes' in their shared values India's ability to assimilate, synthesize, modernize hailed Shifting to LNG just trades devil for witch, energy expert says Tale of ex-Wall St. chief details remarkable climb SE Asia economies largely dominated by 'godfathers'

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Futurist Eric Garland is not just elaborating on the obvious when he writes that China will "overtake the United States as the world's number one beer market" before the end of this century.

Garland freely admits in his new book, "Future Inc.," that it doesn't require a clairvoyant or a rocket scientist to figure that out.

"It's always a good idea to consider the impact of the Chinese market when considering the future of anything," he writes. "When a small percentage of a country with over a billion people starts doing anything more, it can change the dynamics of that industry."

Another reason that the volume of beer consumed in China will before long exceed that guzzled in the United States is that beer drinking is on the decline in the United States relative to other alcoholic beverages, Garland says.

That trend and the increase in Chinese beer consumption are among the findings he unearthed in researching the future of beer. That led him to the conclusion that beer drinking is no longer what it used to be in the United States and that, despite heavy advertising by the beer industry, it is not likely to be that way again.

Garland says that while overall U.S. consumption of alcoholic beverages is steadily increasing, beer consumption is not, because many young, new drinkers are choosing other beverages such as vodka and pinot noir and other wines.

"Beer consumption among young people, once the core demographic for beer, is dropping precipitously — market preference for beer among this group dropped from 71 percent in 1992 to 48 percent in 2005," Garland writes.

He predicts "trouble on the horizon" for the beer companies if that trend continues.

In making his case for the importance of looking ahead, Garland addresses many of the topics that most futurists focus on: the aging of the population; the rising power and falling price of information technology; technological advances in health care, biotechnology, nanotechnology, renewable energy, ecology and sustainability; and the exponentially expanding capacity of media.

The same method that he uses to forecast the future of beer, he writes, can be applied in all other spheres. The crucial element of that kind of "futuring," Garland writes, is thinking of everything within the context of society, technology, economics, ecology and politics, or STEEP.

Such a holistic way of thinking, used by futurists, is not new, Garland says.

He offers a translation of part of a Buddhist sutra to buttress his point: "You cannot look at paper without seeing the trees that served as raw materials, the soil that nourished the tree, and the rain that made the soil fertile."

Only after researching and analyzing the STEEP context of beer does Garland venture to discuss beer's future. He analyzes available data and current trends that are relevant to beer, reads industry literature and compares experts' forecasts.

This book on futuring succeeds as Garland dares to approach the subject differently than most other futurists. He shows how to envision the extraordinary developments of tomorrow by thoroughly researching and analyzing such ordinary fare of today as beer.