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The value of business lies not in what it does today, but in what it seeks to achieve tomorrow. That might seem a little idealistic, given the short-term obsession of many organizations with operational performance, yet it is the future that most interests investors and private owners who now dominate the business world, hoping to see their investments grow through future profits.

Most business leaders are ‘heads down' in a relentless battle to survive, to hang onto the status quo. But that can only lead to diminishing returns. The more enlightened leaders are ‘heads up' looking at where they are going, making sense of how the outside world is changing with every day, identifying the new needs and expectations, the new competitors and challenges, opportunities and possibilities.

The best businesses go to where the future is.

They disrupt before they are disrupted. They sell before they are worthless. They recognize that existing success is increasingly driven by out-dated beliefs, a once-profitable niche that has now become the mainstream, a previous innovation that has been widely imitated, an economy of scale that has become irrelevant, a temporary monopoly that is no more.

As we explore the shifts and trends, the white spaces and technological breakthroughs, the new attitudes and behaviours, we need to learn to think in a different way.

The change is exponential. So we need to jump on whilst we can. Catch the new wave, or better still, learn to ride with the successive, and ever more frequent, waves of change.

When we look around us at the companies who are challenging established positions, shaking up conventions and waking up tired consumers, they are not the big companies but the small ones. They are the speed boats, fast and flexible, rather than supertankers, steady and stable.

The challenge is extreme. It demands that we rethink where we're going, and how to get there, rather than hanging on to what made us great before.

In a fast and connected world, complex and uncertain, a winning business cannot hope to keep doing what it does and do better. It has to do more, or different.