Futurist Rolf Jensen has made a nice living getting international companies ready for the end of the information age.

By Steffan Heuer

Forget about the Net for a minute, lean back and listen. Rolf Jensen likes to spin a good yarn, especially on this gray winter day in the Danish capital of Copenhagen. Lit pipe in hand, hunched over a cup of strong coffee in his cramped office, the futurist re-enacts Homer's epic for the information age.

"Why are we here?" Jensen asks rhetorically, his voice low and husky. "Every company's story is like the Odyssey. Its founders set out in a small boat. They have to conquer storms, wars, enemies. They will meet Sirens, they will encounter the Cyclops with his one-eyed vision of the market. They will hopefully live to tell [their tale]. But if you do [live], and you can't explain your odyssey, you have a problem."

That's where Jensen comes in. The director of the Copenhagen Institute for Future Studies has been brooding over the question of what comes after modern capitalism's current information age for the better part of the last decade.

Dozens of lectures and roundtable discussions later, he has formulated a blueprint of what he calls the "Dream Society." The book published last year by the same title, subtitled "How the Coming Shift From Information to Imagination Will Transform Your Business," is out in three languages, with six more versions for Europe and Asia on the way.

Jensen's dream society is mostly a rich man's world where all material needs are satiated, all the electronic little helpers are embedded and quietly doing their job. If you want to survive the end of the information age - and Jensen thinks it could come within a decade - you need to make sure you're not stuck with a portfolio of low-margin, commodified products. You want to be Nike - not a shoemaker, but the enabler of the "Just Do It" story.

Consumers and employees have one gaping hole to fill: their emotional needs. Money can buy you love, Jensen says: "It's a new society in which businesses, communities and people as individuals will thrive on the basis of their stories, not just on data and information. We will cease to define ourselves through physical products, relying instead on stories and feelings."

The Copenhagen Institute has made a good business out of plying this kind of futurespeak. The Nordic think tank's musings on the future have attracted a worldwide following, including 110 member companies and organizations. Three Danish government ministries; the city of Copenhagen; ad firms like DDB Needham; Scandinavian companies like Lego and Bang & Olufsen; and multinationals like Procter & Gamble each pay about $10,000 a year to pick the Danes' brains and learn how to make money from what Jensen labels the "fifth society."

The first stirrings of Jensen's book came in an article Jensen wrote four years ago for the U.S. publication the Futurist, which synthesized what the institute's staff of 35 had been preaching for years. The Danish thinker has an interesting take on social inventions, says Lane Jennings, who last fall reviewed Jensen's book for the Futurist. "What happens when we stop paying attention to the prime purpose of what we're doing?" asks Jennings.

"For years we were told you sell the sizzle, not the steak. Jensen goes a step further and suggests the sizzle is everything."

When you enter the fifth society, think circular, think loincloth, think tribal communities. Mankind, according to Jensen, is merely completing an evolution that took it from hunter-gatherer to farmer to industrial worker and, as fourth iteration of Homo sapiens, to knowledge worker. Wiring and automating everything, even extending the network into one's brain, might warm the hearts of geeks and scientists, but to Jensen, the obsession with rationality and technical progress that this kind of technical utopia represents isn't viable for the future.

The stocky 59-year-old looks every bit the hip, modern Dane, walking the orderly streets of old Copenhagen in a dark suit hidden under a screeching-yellow Timberland windbreaker. Jensen's office is around the corner from Kronprinsessegade, where yuppies sip coffee and shop in expensive designer stores.

Sure, he has a PC on his desk, but as he opens the top drawer of his desk, he reveals a more important productivity tool - a jumble of light blue lids of Captan pipe tobacco.

A political scientist by training, Jensen puts himself in the storytelling tradition of fellow Danes Hans Christian Andersen and Karen Blixen. He listens to storytellers and folk tales ranging from Tennessee to Norway, soaks up their methods, leafs through Fast Company, Time and the Economist, and pours the mix into his dream mold.

In short, Jensen predicts that 21st-century society will have a lot in common with the hunter-gatherers of old. "The brief reign of the information society still falls within the overall domain of the obsolescent materialistic societal type," writes Jensen in The Dream Society, "and thus it is very conceivable that within 20 years, this type of society will be rejected as being anachronistic and cheerless."

Asked where he finds the certainty to predict the demise of what's hailed by many thinkers as a cataclysm even bigger than the industrial revolution, the futurist takes a drag from his pipe and shoots a trollish smile my way: "If you come to think of it, Homo sapiens is still the same. There's been no product development for us in the last 100,000 years."

The problem, he says, is that stories weren't part of the marketplace; they inhabited the noncommercial realms of literature, religion and ideology.

People in the richest parts of the world - which Jensen narrows down to 25 nations with roughly 800 million inhabitants and an average per-capita income of at least $11,000 a year, including 300 million members of an urban middle class in the developing world - are wealthy but dissatisfied. They have a TV, a PC, a cell phone, but now what?

Just as romanticism followed the enlightenment, the post-information society will put growing emphasis on feelings and ideas. People will organize their lives at home and at work accordingly and they will shop accordingly. Jensen's favorite example are Danes who have taken to buying organic eggs, raising the market share of the more expensive eggs from these "happy hens" to 50 percent. Why? Because shoppers buy the story of healthy agriculture and well-treated animals.

In a similar vein, Mickey Mouse and the Marlboro Man have been selling stories of a happy childhood or manly freedom that go far beyond a theme-park ride or a smoke. Jensen cites other examples of successful stories: Starbucks (SBUX) doesn't just sell double decaf skinny lattes, it sells a cozy re-creation of home and hearth; Harley-Davidson (HDI) doesn't just sell motorcycles, it sells the myth of Jack Kerouac's On the Road to office-bound yuppies. These are products from companies that have already made the transition from functionality to built-in tale.

This new breed of capitalist storytellers depends on attracting smart, empowered workers who listen to consumers with their hearts and minds. It's no wonder that Jensen refers to Daniel Goleman's book Emotional Intelligence more often than the Net.

As the rational person is being displaced by a "story-buying entity," the shift will have wide-ranging consequences for management, the workplace and the home, says Jensen. Companies will begin to reorganize into tribes. New senior positions such as "director of mind and mood" or "minister of progress" will sell the company's odyssey internally. The "intangible asset appraiser" will gauge the value of human capital and ideas currently not accounted for on today's balance sheets.

Most surprising of all, the Danish futurist thinks stock markets will wither away as workers become the major stakeholders in the enterprise. They are the intellectual capital of postindustrial ventures, he says. But how will startups fund brand-building campaigns to get their stories out there if they can't borrow against the imagination and emotions of investors who buy new stocks based on, well, good stories? Jensen pauses: "I'm not totally convinced about it myself. I haven't thought it through."

Jensen also sees a future in which the boundaries between work and life blur: "Families will want to buy products with a built-in component aglow with family happiness - products radiating the idea of love, permanent values and peace of mind," Jensen argues. "The home of the future will be intelligent, yet its main function will be to accommodate family bliss and the symbols of love."

Jensen is beginning to sound suspiciously like 1950s ads for the happy homemaker. Advertising has always tried to appeal to our aspirations and cravings, with mixed results. The theory of "conspicuous consumption" and attempts to explain why we buy what we buy have been around since Thorstein Veblen's seminal Theory of the Leisure Class was published over 100 years ago.

Jensen himself tips his hat to the great economist John Maynard Keynes. In his 1930 essay "The Economic Prospects of Our Grandchildren," Keynes predicted that within 100 years economic pressures would vanish for more and more people. Then we would be free to live by more traditional principles and values and honor "these admirable people who know how to enjoy things. Like the lilies of the field."

The big omission in The Dream Society is any serious mention of the Net's impact on getting us to this golden new age. "He describes a valid trend, but he's thinking one step too far," says Mikael Lindholm, editor of the leading Danish business publication, Borsen Nyhedsmagasin, which lies a short walk from the Institute's red-bricked compound in central Copenhagen.

Although Denmark just scored fifth place in International Data Corp.'s annual Information Society Index, Lindholm believes Jensen doesn't grasp the importance of the networked society. "He's never been technology-oriented and just skips it altogether in the book. When it comes to e-business, Denmark's [business] leadership is somewhat backward," says Lindholm, who has written extensively about the Internet.

CEOs who read Jensen as a guidebook to the future won't necessarily feel compelled to embrace an e-business strategy. Follow the storyline of the friendly neighborhood milkman of yore, update it to the present day, and do you end up with Webvan? The book doesn't have an accompanying Web site or links, nor does it use Net-based enterprises as examples. What's more, Jensen faces stiff competition from competing storytellers like Joseph Pine and James Gilmore, who tread similar ground last year in The Experience Economy.

Jensen dismisses such criticism as the wrong approach to his book. His defense is a pie chart divided into three pieces, which he scribbles on the back of a sheet of paper: technology (T), globalization (G) and emotions (E) form a circle. "The book is about one aspect of the future," he says, circling the E slice again and again with blue ink. Besides, he adds, "e-commerce doesn't appear [in the book] because it came along after I'd written it."

E-commerce has been around for years: So much for Jensen's ability to see the future. Jensen concedes that the digital economy is important and points to the latest member of the Institute, Boston-based Internet strategy firm Zefer. "They agree with us that you don't need a strategy, but a mission statement for your company, or you can call it your tribe."

The next step will be to sell the Amazons of the Internet world on the need for new storytelling methods. In August, Jensen will start writing the sequel to The Dream Society. He calls it a "toolbox for building the dream society," and says it will detail how to develop, construct and communicate convincing stories.

It may be Jensen who needs some new tools for reading the future. Before Y2K, he had predicted huge demand for millennium-related goods like champagne and fancy trips. Turns out the story people really wanted to hear was one around the fire at home.

Steffan Heuer is a writer in New York.

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