His marriage to Ms. Senior ended in divorce, as did his second, to Patricia Aburdene. Along with his daughter, he is survived by his third wife, Doris (Dinklage) Naisbitt; his sons James, David and John; another daughter, Nana Naisbitt; a stepdaughter, Nora Rosenblatt; 11 grandchildren and two step-grandchildren.
Mr. Naisbitt ran out of money after only two semesters, and with his first child on the way he dropped out of college to take a job writing speeches for executives at Eastman Kodak, in Rochester, N.Y.
He and his family moved to Chicago in 1957, where he worked in public relations jobs. He worked in Washington between 1963 and 1966, first as an assistant to the director of the National Education Commission, then as an assistant to the secretary of health, education and welfare.
It was during an assignment to assess the impact of various Great Society programs under President Lyndon B. Johnson, he said, that he first developed his method of trend analysis. A fan of American history, he had been reading books about the Civil War by Bruce Catton, who had relied heavily on contemporary newspapers to get a sense of the country’s mood during the war.
“I went out to a newsstand and I bought about 50 out-of-town newspapers,” he told The Christian Science Monitor in 1982. “And I was absolutely stunned what I learned in three hours about what was going on in America.”
He called it “content analysis,” and after he returned to Chicago, he put it into practice with his first firm, the Urban Research Corporation. Long before computers made such work nearly instantaneous, Mr. Naisbitt employed a small army of analysts to read through scores of newspapers a day, clipping stories about urban protests, crime and campus unrest, which he drew on to write reports for nonprofit and corporate clients.
With his first marriage ending and his company losing money, he moved back to Washington in the mid-1970s and opened another, similar firm. It also failed, leading him to file for personal bankruptcy in 1977.