Leadership is about predicting the future

I think entrepreneurship and leadership are about predicting the future and the place of your business in that future. According to “Lead from the Future: How to Turn Visionary Thinking Into Breakthrough Growth” that 75% of the people they surveyed reported that their planning and forecasting horizons are never more than five years out. Only 10% plan for eight to ten years or more. If you are only thinking two or three years ahead, years five to ten might bring you an unwelcome surprise that you haven’t planned for.

Routine management

At the root of the problem is the processes by which senior management develop its strategic choices and priorities, which are overdetermined by their existing ways of doing things. That is the present-forward fallacy, the seductive notion that an existing business can be extended out in time indefinitely by continuously making improvements to it. Where the job at hand is routine management. But when markets shift, consumer preferences change, or new technologies emerge, leaders who solely think in a present-forward way are often caught unawares, busily working to solve today’s problems but utterly unprepared for the even bigger ones that are on their way. If a strategy is simply extrapolated from the present forward, your existing processes, rules, norms, and metrics will get in your way.