Organisations cannot control the direction that powerful global forces will take over the next fifty years, but they can control how they respond to these forces. In fact, we are seeing organization that are seeking to shape the future with high stake bets on business strategy, whilst some others are favouring investments in flexibility on their strategy approach that will allow their companies to adopt a wait, see and react strategy.

We do know that if the rate of change outside their business is greater than the rate of change inside the business, the operation will become obsolete and redundant and will start the journey into terminal decline.

Key in great companies is how we transform these challenges into a distinct and competitive advantage. There is a case where understanding the present is of limited help in projecting the future. As Peter Drucker has both argued and shown, in general, understanding the present enables you to dispense with futurology. If you correctly interpret what is happening now, you will win a huge advantage over the competition. Most other people will misunderstand the present and will base their plans on continuity. Extending the past into the future of allowing domain bias to influence your decision is certain to be fatal in discontinuous times.

The key trends that we have noticed in our research are that:

• Business leaders view more demanding customers not as a threat, but as an opportunity to differentiate. Business leaders are spending more to attract and retain prosperous and informed customers.
• Nearly all business leaders are adapting their business models, with two-thirds implementing extensive innovations; 44 percent are changing their models to be more collaborative.
• Business leaders are moving aggressively toward global business designs, changing capabilities and partnering more extensively. Organisations of all sizes are reconfiguring to take advantage of global integration opportunities.
• Financial outperformers are making bolder plays. They are anticipating change and managing it better, whilst also being more global in their business designs, partnering more extensively and choosing more disruptive forms of business model innovation.
• Business leaders are maintaining strategic alignment from top-to-bottom. This is achieved by sensing, responding to, and driving changes in their strategies for aligning people, processes and technology. They choose the right tools and technologies and use what they have already, more effectively and by continually measuring, tracking and improving performance.

The traits required for future success, which we are seeing in these businesses, are:

• Embracing ambiguity and hunger for change;
• Unbridled inquisitiveness, with the ability to synthesise and analyse the new paradigms;
• Truly diverse and are capable of harnessing the power of culture;
• A culture that is innovative beyond customer imagination;
• Understanding the written and unwritten rules and are rewriting the rules;
• Glo-localand are globally integrated;
• Prepared to go to the edge, incubate and be disruptive;
• Tough, genuine, not just generous and drive the three Ps simultaneously (People, Planet, Profit);
• Rapid fire change with fast multiple prototyping—failing fast;
• Trust and authenticity at their core.

The implementation of the ROV model, taking the Risks, being Original  and Virtuosity (i.e. doing the ordinary in an extraordinary way) are the characteristics of the best companies, which we feel will adapt, change and transform into the great businesses of tomorrow.