Читать книгу Driving Eureka! - Doug Hall - Страница 44

The paragraphs above make it seem easy to lead an organization into the future. It’s not. It’s very hard to set strategy for the future. That’s because the future is unknown.

When setting strategy, leaders always work with imperfect information. They make decisions on where competitors and customers are going to be in the future. I say this in my own defense. The students on campus like to remind me of the interview I did in 1999 for Inc. magazine. In it, I was asked what I thought about the internet. My response was:

The internet is a library. Before it existed, I didn’t go to the library that often. Now that it exists, I don’t go there any more than I went before. It’s a great place to find eclectic facts, but its practicality and functionality are limited.

It’s fair to say that I totally missed that one. And the internet’s “memory” is very unforgiving.

It’s not possible to predict the future with precision. Fortunately, there are Future Mining tools that we teach, such as if/then scenarios, patent mining, and lead user immersions, that can help leaders think smarter about the future.