Tom Cheesewright - Future-Proof Your Business (Penguin Business Experts)

Tom Cheesewright is an applied futurist, helping people and organizations around the world to see the future more clearly, share their vision and respond with innovation. An accomplished speaker and broadcaster, he specializes in connecting tomorrows world to todays experience, making sense of whats happening next, and why. Toms clients include global 500 corporations, government departments, industry bodies and charities. Notable clients include: Accenture, Audi, Bacardi, Barclays, BASF, Bertelsmann, BMW, BP, BT, Facebook, Google, HSBC, HMRC, ITV, Kelloggs, Sony, Virgin Media and Visa. Toms first book, High Frequency Change, was published in June 2019.

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First published 2020

Copyright Tom Cheesewright, 2020

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Text design by Richard Marston

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ISBN: 978-0-241-44645-4

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Let me start with a nightmare. Imagine you are driving down the motorway at speed and you lose control of your car. You realize that your accelerator pedal is stuck and your brakes have stopped working. As your speed increases, cars and trucks start rushing towards you, and you begin to swerve across the road as you try desperately to avoid a collision. Your adrenaline levels skyrocket, panic rises and survival strategies whir through your brain at lightning speed. One wrong move now could be catastrophic.

What is going to keep you alive?

This is the scenario that every leader in business faces today. We are all operating in an age of high-frequency change. Overlaid on existing large, multi-decade trends are many small, fast waves of change enabled by a globalized market and the friction-lowering effect of technology. These high-frequency waves carry rapid shifts in everything from consumer products to popular culture, and from corporate systems to customer attitudes. Their effects tend to be narrow, touching just one sector or industry, or even a single company. But within those narrow bounds they can be extremely disruptive. Business people around the world are finding that the pace of this change is accelerating; more obstacles are appearing and creating an increasingly complex landscape in which to manage a successful business, both now and in the future.

So, how do you survive?

The phenomenon of high-frequency change has forced organizations from BMW to the British government to think differently about how they do business, and in doing so they have often called on me for advice. This book contains the distilled lessons that I have learned while working with many different organizations on the challenges they face in preparing for the future. This is my tried and tested method for changing the outlook, behaviour and even shape of any business to prepare it for the uncertainty of tomorrow.

The book is structured around the three core characteristics of future-ready organizations, characteristics that are very similar to those we see in the worlds best athletes.

Top sports stars shape their bodies for the challenges facing them. They build the agility and strength they require for their discipline. They are limber and supple, and able to show resilience in the face of sometimes punishing competition. You will similarly need to build a culture of agility within your own organization. You will learn in this book how to reshape your business for an age where adaptability to tomorrows challenge is a better predictor of success than being perfectly optimized to todays conditions.

Successful athletes have both a profound sense of their immediate environment and great strategic awareness. They can read the game before anyone else and translate that understanding into winning action. Think about the racing driver with an almost sixth sense about the positions of their competitors behind them. Think about the marathon runner knowing exactly when to make their break. Or the footballer able to make that defence-splitting diagonal pass, placing the ball on the boot of the winger who they just know will be running forward to receive it. Foresight like this is a skill of fundamental importance to leaders. In this book you will learn to hone your ability to spot potential obstacles before they arise. The further off you can identify issues, the more chance you have of preparing yourself, steering your organization towards safety and staying in control of your operational environment.

Winning athletes process information quickly and make the right decisions. They absorb the rich information from their senses and map out the possibilities that their foresight presents. Then they make a decision and take action fast. You must do the same, accelerating the flow of useful information through your business and speeding the response to external stimuli.

These three characteristics agility, awareness and action are visible in the most future-proof businesses. I call such businesses Athletic Organizations. Use the proven tools in this book and you can make your organization more athletic. Each of the three parts addresses one of the three characteristics.

The first part of this book is about the structure of your business. About getting fit, like the athlete, and sufficiently agile to face the challenges ahead. Just as a better-handling car would give you the greatest chance of survival in the motorway scenario with which I began, a more agile business is better equipped to respond to future shocks. Business leaders around the world know that the future is more uncertain now than ever. They know that their business models may have a shorter shelf life than they would have had ten or twenty years ago. So, they are changing the structure of their businesses to make them more agile. Instead of optimizing for todays reality, they are building businesses that can adapt constantly for more sustainable success. In , I will explain the fundamentals of structuring a business that can be continually reconfigured to meet changing market demands.

The second part of this book is about developing awareness and foresight, just like the athlete learning to read the game. You need to be clear what is likely to happen in the immediate future, the near future, and beyond. This is something that most companies do very poorly. Including foresight tools and processes as part of your day-to-day management activity will give your organization an immediate advantage. It does not have to be time-consuming and it does not have to be expensive. But it does have to be consistent. Forward planning is not something that can be thought about every five or ten years any more. It is an activity that must be conducted at least twice a year. In , I will explain different approaches for looking to the future, and suggest how and when you use them to give your company the clearest picture of tomorrow.