SEEING THE
FUTURE
IN THE PRESENT
Innovators understand change. They welcome it rather than trying to resist it. Somehow they know how to make change work for them rather than against them. They have the skills that enable them to turn discontinuity into opportunity.
It’s not that innovators are better at trend forecasting or scenario planning. They are not futurists. They don’t have any proprietary data about “the next big thing,” and they are not very interested in making long-term predictions. It’s just that they seem to have a knack for recognizing and harnessing the potential of things that are already changing, where others do not. To paraphrase Martha Graham, “No innovator is ahead of his time. He is his time. It is just that others are behind the times.”
Did Amazon know something about the future of retail that Walmart didn’t? Did Apple know something about the future of mobile telephony that Nokia or Motorola didn’t? Did Netflix know something about the future of movie rental that Blockbuster didn’t? Everything that needed to be known to revolutionize these industries was already known by both the pioneers and the laggards. All the data was out there in the public domain. The difference is that the industry challengers saw an opportunity to use the power of change to their own advantage, while the incumbents either underestimated or ignored critical trends until it ...
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