Outlook Journal, May 2006
Trend spotting is an important component of business decision making. No trend is proof positive, of course. But in an increasingly complex global business environment, the need to manage for both today and tomorrow has never been more critical, and managing for tomorrow requires having some idea of where things are heading.
High-performance businesses know this. When it comes to making the big decisions about strategic direction, they are highly adept not only at anticipating trends but also at executing, often simultaneously, across several time horizons—short, medium and long term. This keen sense of business frontiers enables them to capitalize on opportunities over time, whether this takes the form of introducing new products, creating new businesses or entering new markets, always ahead of the competition.
It was largely with this in mind—the idea that successful organizations inevitably have long-term vision and take specific actions to shape their own futures—that more than 50 senior Accenture leaders, assisted by a global team of researchers and practitioners, spent several months working on a comprehensive program of research to identify and analyze those global trends that will have the biggest impact on business, markets and society during the next several years. "Making the trend your friend," the article that begins on page 8, is based on the results of their efforts.
Trend spotting has a long and honorable history, of course, while lists and rankings—the best, the richest, the most important—are a staple of contemporary popular and business journalism. We think two qualities set our research project apart from the rest of the pack, however.
First, with its detailed "business imperatives"—prescriptions for what organizations can do to profit from each of the 10 global trends the team identified—this visioning exercise fills an action void left by similar efforts published recently, which offer no such insight. Second, the findings were analyzed using Accenture's High Performance Business research methodology to determine specifically how organizations need to respond to these trends to achieve or maintain high performance.
"Taking action on trends is a company's best hope of ensuring a bright future," notes Outlook Senior Contributing Editor Paul Nunes, an executive research fellow at the Accenture Institute for High Performance Business and one of the coauthors of this article. "It's why high-performance businesses seem to make so many obvious good moves, and why they are only obvious to external observers in hindsight."
David Cudaback
Editor-in-Chief, Outlook
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