How can we embrace strategic thinking when we don’t know what the future will bring?
Many board members have achieved their current position because of their previous operational success. This track record of operational success has had to have been founded on solid skills of ensuring that their business units deliver results, managing risk, and minimising the potentially disruptive effects of short-term changes so that the the business can continue to function under the dual tenets of effectiveness and efficiency.
Can we justify taking on board (and onto the board) someone who has had failures in their professional past – aren’t we obliged to hire the safe pair of hands? Do we select out the strategic visioning gene from our top leadership – and indeed from leadership at all levels? “Nobody is sacked for buying IBM”, it used to be said. And to Tom Watson, the first President of IBM, is attributed the alleged statement of 1943. “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers”. Could any business leader of the 1940s have foreseen the power and impact of today’s technology, let alone its unknown potential to our immediate and long term future?
Technology first enables us to do things differently – and then to do different things. Technology means that borders do not exist – ideas, technologies and economic activity don’t need passports or residence permits. So if there is no limit to our potential – how do we engage in the massive uplift that is there “sans frontieres”? How do our leaders help their organisations create strategies that will lead the way in doing business differently, doing different business, and working differently?
To do things differently, we have to do different things. We have to learn to unlearn, to forget the past in order to do things differently in the present and in the future. We have to develop in yourself and foster in others a hunger for creativity, communication, and adaptability, break out of habitual boxes and boundaries, encourage enquiring minds, whilst all the time scanning the horizon for new possibilities, new patterns, new directions.
How many of us would have predicted back in 2005 that the new boy on the block – YouTube, would now in 2012 be the largest media channel in the world?