When Dean Harris asked me to contribute an article, I naturally began to think of the past. I had visions of classrooms, professors and friends from my days at Georgia State and the Robinson College of Business. But I couldn't indulge in nostalgia for long because I had been asked to write about an issue facing American business. And that always means keeping your eye firmly on the present - or better still, on the future.

In the 30 years since I left GSU, I have seen my company transform itself again and again. During that time, we went from being a local enterprise to the coast-to-coast company with offices in 37 countries we are today. From offering deposit accounts and loans for consumer and commercial customers to serving global corporations as well as tens of millions of consumers with a full range of financial services. From doing business with adding machines and typewriters to serving over 3 million customers through online banking and maintaining the largest ATM network in the world.

If there's one overriding lesson I've learned on this journey, it's that a successful company not only adapts and responds to changing conditions; to truly succeed, a company must anticipate change, seek the opportunities those changing conditions present - and position itself to capitalize on them.

Today as we enter a new century, there are many trends and events on the horizon that present big changes to American business. The aging of our population will challenge retailers and marketers and will shift resources in our economy. Along with that trend, the greatest transfer of wealth in our history will occur in the next 50 years as $40 trillion - yes, that's trillion - passes from one generation to the next. In another arena, emerging technologies related to the Internet will continue to force businesses to redevelop their business models. These issues are receiving plenty of attention from business leaders, government and the general press.

One upcoming change some may be overlooking is the predicted demographic shift in the U.S. population. We don't yet have the final numbers from the 2000 census, but preliminary reports allow us to identify a number of trends quite clearly Among these, we see a dramatic shift emerging in the relative proportions of various racial and ethnic groups in the population. Simply put, through a combination of immigration patterns and differentials in birth rates, the Hispanic and Asian American populations are growing faster than the African American population, and all sectors are growing faster than the category labeled by the census as white, non-Hispanic, There is every reason to believe these trends will continue or even accelerate. When they are projected 20 years or 50 years into the future, we see a U.S. population with no clear majority group.