A Look Ahead: Three Mega Trends to Watch

To make your operations run more efficiently, he offered the following tips: “Challenge everything you do. Make your vendors accountable in order to gain incremental value. And measure performance to gain insight into the full economic impact of your actions.”

2. Customer demographics will continue to change, he noted. For example, by 2015, caucasians will make up 65 percent of the U.S. population, down from 74 percent today. Hispanics will account for 45 percent of the population growth by 2010. And by 2015, only 20 percent of U.S. households will be the two-parent variety.