The year 2025 brought forth a remarkable selection of business books that go far beyond traditional management advice. In an era defined by rapid technological acceleration, geopolitical tension, institutional complexity, and uncertainty about progress, these books do more than instruct on leadership — they explain why leadership matters, and in what contexts it can be effective.

The five books highlighted here — House of Huawei, The Thinking Machine, How Progress Ends, Abundance, and Breakneck — reflect the multidimensional challenges that modern business leaders face. They explore technological innovation, corporate strategy, institutional constraints, national competition, and the conditions under which ideas scale. Together, they reveal common themes critical for business leadership today:

  • Technology as central to strategy: Leaders must understand AI, semiconductors, and critical infrastructure to compete.

  • Innovation is fragile and context-dependent: Breakthroughs must align with institutional, political, and cultural structures.

  • Scale depends on systems and ecosystems: Success is shaped by networks, regulatory environments, and collaborative infrastructure.

  • Leadership requires navigating complexity: Executives must operate at the intersection of geopolitics, technology, and societal expectations.

  • Progress is contested: Optimism about technological potential coexists with scepticism about institutional inertia and risk.

These books stood out because they combine rigorous research, historical insight, and narrative storytelling to illuminate real-world constraints. They provide leaders with frameworks to navigate complexity and anticipate disruption in a hyperconnected, high-stakes global economy.

House of Huawei … The Secret History of China’s Most Powerful Company by Eva Dou

House of Huawei is a meticulous and compelling chronicle of one of the world’s most enigmatic companies. Eva Dou traces Huawei’s evolution from a small provincial telecom supplier to a global technology powerhouse, while exploring the political, economic, and cultural contexts that made its rise possible. Dou’s reporting blends corporate biography with geopolitical analysis, providing a lens through which to understand the intersections of business, technology, and state power.

The book begins with the company’s founding by Ren Zhengfei, a former military engineer whose disciplined leadership and strategic vision shaped Huawei’s ethos. Unlike Silicon Valley founders, Ren prioritised engineering excellence, cost efficiency, and relentless global expansion, which allowed Huawei to challenge established Western incumbents. Early chapters highlight the company’s reverse-engineering efforts on telecommunications switches, demonstrating a culture of intense learning and skill accumulation. Dou vividly describes how employees worked long hours in grueling conditions, cultivating a deep technical expertise that later powered Huawei’s success in 3G and 4G markets.

A defining episode is the 2018 arrest of CFO Meng Wanzhou in Canada at the request of U.S. authorities. This incident illustrates how Huawei’s rise could not be separated from geopolitical tension, as Western governments scrutinised the company’s links to Beijing. Dou shows that Huawei’s corporate culture — described as “wolf warrior” for its fierce competitiveness and loyalty — both fuelled its success and intensified suspicion abroad. Huawei’s ability to operate in emerging markets, often where Western competitors were absent, is framed as both a strength and a geopolitical flashpoint.

Dou also provides insight into Huawei’s global strategy, highlighting its focus on long-term R&D investment, network expansion, and talent development. The company’s approach to risk, regulation, and partnership is dissected with attention to detail, showing how operational discipline combined with strategic foresight to build resilience. Huawei’s story is not presented as a simple triumph; Dou balances admiration for engineering and execution with critical reflection on ethical, political, and security implications.

For business leaders, House of Huawei demonstrates that competitive advantage comes from a combination of technical mastery, organisational discipline, and geopolitical savvy. Success in global technology markets is not only about products or strategy, but also about understanding and navigating the broader systems — political, regulatory, and cultural — in which firms operate. Dou’s book offers a blueprint for how companies can operate at the edge of possibility while balancing ethical, strategic, and operational pressures, making it a vital study in contemporary corporate leadership.

The Thinking Machine … Jensen Huang, Nvidia, and the World’s Most Coveted Microchip by Stephen Witt

The Thinking Machine chronicles the rise of Nvidia and the vision of its co-founder and CEO, Jensen Huang, whose leadership transformed a graphics chip manufacturer into the epicentre of the AI revolution. Stephen Witt combines biography, corporate history, and technology reporting to explore how Nvidia’s GPUs became the critical infrastructure for machine learning, high-performance computing, and modern AI. The book is part corporate strategy study, part technological narrative, and part character portrait, offering leaders insight into the combination of vision, execution, and ecosystem orchestration required to create a market-defining company.

Huang emerges as a visionary yet pragmatic leader. Witt details the early challenges Nvidia faced: fierce competition from established semiconductor players, tight capital conditions, and the need to convince both developers and investors of the potential of GPU technology beyond gaming. Huang’s strategic insight was recognising that GPUs could excel at parallel computation, making them ideal for deep learning workloads — long before AI’s commercial boom. This foresight allowed Nvidia to pivot successfully from consumer graphics to enterprise-scale AI infrastructure.

A compelling anecdote involves Nvidia’s early bet on AI research. Huang anticipated that deep learning would reshape computing, and he invested heavily in developing GPUs optimised for these workloads, creating the architectural foundation that competitors struggled to replicate. Witt highlights how Huang cultivated an ecosystem of partners, from cloud providers to research labs, reinforcing Nvidia’s dominance. This demonstrates the strategic importance of ecosystem orchestration, not just technological innovation.

The book also explores Nvidia’s culture of engineering excellence, cross-functional collaboration, and disciplined risk-taking. It emphasises how leadership vision must be paired with the ability to execute, communicate, and align stakeholders across diverse domains. The narrative shows that innovation at scale is as much about organisational design and foresight as it is about invention.

For business leaders, The Thinking Machine is a guide to anticipating technological shifts, leveraging ecosystem dynamics, and leading organisations capable of defining entire markets. Witt’s account reminds readers that technical insight must be combined with strategic acumen and operational precision to achieve global impact. Nvidia’s journey demonstrates that visionary leadership, when paired with disciplined execution and network effects, creates enduring competitive advantage in high-tech industries.

How Progress Ends … Technology, Innovation, and the Fate of Nations by Carl Benedikt Frey

In How Progress Ends, Carl Benedikt Frey examines the fragility of technological and economic progress, arguing that innovation alone does not guarantee prosperity. Frey traces historical patterns in which breakthroughs failed to translate into sustained growth, demonstrating how institutions, culture, and scaling capacity shape the ultimate impact of new ideas.

Frey’s central argument is that progress is contingent. He contrasts historical examples such as Song China, where technical ingenuity did not translate into global dominance, with the United States, where federal structures enabled experimentation and diffusion of ideas. He demonstrates that technological potential requires alignment with organisational, political, and economic systems to achieve meaningful outcomes.

The book explores the tension between decentralisation and centralisation. Decentralised systems foster experimentation, risk-taking, and serendipity, whereas centralised systems allow for rapid scaling and consolidation of innovation. Frey argues that societies — and by extension, businesses — must strike a balance to avoid stagnation. Overemphasis on either can stifle progress: too much centralisation produces rigidity, while too much decentralisation produces fragmentation.

Historical anecdotes illustrate this vividly. Frey recounts how Europe’s fragmented city-states enabled scientific experimentation and competition, while imperial bureaucracies often stifled similar breakthroughs. In contemporary terms, Frey warns that even the most advanced economies risk stagnation if institutions cannot absorb and scale innovation efficiently.

For business leaders, the book underscores the importance of contextual intelligence: understanding not just technology, but the institutional and social frameworks that determine whether it can succeed. Companies must anticipate regulatory, cultural, and operational barriers and design strategies that allow ideas to scale. Frey’s work provides a framework for recognising systemic bottlenecks and crafting organisations capable of sustaining long-term innovation in complex environments.

Abundance … How We Build a Better Future by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson

Abundance examines the paradox of technological capability versus societal outcomes. Klein and Thompson argue that scarcity often stems from policy and institutional barriers, not lack of technical capacity, and that innovation alone cannot solve systemic problems unless it aligns with regulatory and political structures.

The book contrasts extraordinary successes — such as the rapid development of COVID-19 vaccines — with decades-long delays in infrastructure projects in housing, transportation, and energy. These examples illustrate that clear policy objectives, streamlined processes, and coordinated leadership can unlock transformational outcomes even in bureaucratic systems.

Klein and Thompson argue that business leaders must recognise the strategic significance of regulatory and policy environments. Understanding where incentives, rules, and procedural bottlenecks lie allows organisations to plan realistically and influence systems to enable impact at scale. The authors also advocate collaboration between the public and private sectors to overcome systemic obstacles, highlighting how multi-stakeholder coordination can accelerate progress.

A central theme is that abundance — widespread prosperity enabled by technology — is achievable but requires systemic orchestration. Business leaders are challenged to think beyond product innovation to consider the infrastructure, regulations, and institutional mechanisms that enable growth.

Through rich storytelling and data-driven analysis, Abundance offers practical insights for leaders seeking to maximise impact, navigate institutional barriers, and build projects capable of delivering tangible benefits to society. It emphasises that successful enterprises are as much builders of systems as producers of goods or services.

Breakneck … China’s Quest to Engineer the Future by Dan Wang

Breakneck explores China’s industrial and technological rise as an “engineering state” capable of executing large-scale projects with speed, coordination, and precision. Dan Wang presents a compelling thesis: China’s distinct institutional and cultural structures prioritise rapid execution and systemic engineering, contrasting sharply with the U.S.’s slower, more deliberative model.

Wang documents how China combines central planning, state-aligned incentives, and disciplined project management to achieve rapid urbanisation, infrastructure build-out, and industrial innovation. He provides rich anecdotal narratives — from sprawling factory complexes to high-speed rail projects — to illustrate how the country translates ambition into tangible outcomes.

The book highlights China’s strategic focus on technological and industrial self-reliance, including semiconductor development, renewable energy, and AI. Wang describes how the state orchestrates talent, capital, and infrastructure to mitigate risk and accelerate deployment, creating competitive advantages that foreign competitors find difficult to match.

For business leaders, Breakneck provides lessons on institutional capacity, execution discipline, and risk alignment. It demonstrates that national or organisational models profoundly shape the ability to innovate at scale, manage complex projects, and compete globally. Wang’s book encourages leaders to consider context — not only market opportunities but also structural capabilities — when designing strategy.

Ultimately, Breakneck underscores that speed, system design, and coordinated execution are central to competitive advantage in a world where technological and industrial leadership defines power and prosperity.

Inspired to action

The best business books of 2025 reveal that leadership today requires a multidimensional perspective. Success is shaped by technological insight, institutional understanding, ecosystem orchestration, geopolitical awareness, and execution discipline. House of Huawei, The Thinking Machine, How Progress Ends, Abundance, and Breakneck collectively provide a roadmap for leaders seeking to navigate complexity, scale impact, and harness opportunity in a world defined by uncertainty and rapid change.

In today’s world of relentless change, disruption and transformation are constants. Companies face a stark paradox: they must deliver the results of today while inventing the business of tomorrow.

The conventional operating model of business is no longer fit for purpose. It prioritises the short-term, it seeks efficiency and scale, simplified focus and predictable growth. It is designed for linear markets, stable customer behaviour, and slow-moving technologies. Today, these become the obstacles to reinvention, creating inertia, misalignment, and vulnerability to disruption.

The best companies embrace a new model, which I call “the Dual Operating System” (Dual OS) of business.

It creates a strategic, organisational and cultural framework which allows organisations to exploit their current capabilities while exploring new growth opportunities simultaneously, ensuring that the business of today and the business of tomorrow are managed in parallel under a single strategic umbrella. In markets of relentless change, this becomes a continuous activity.

Unlike older ambidextrous concepts, which often remains conceptual, the Dual OS is practical, embedded, and operationalised, offering a blueprint for organisations to climb successive S-curves of growth without compromising current performance.

Leading examples  – from Amazon and BYD to DBS Bank and Ping An – illustrate the power of the Dual OS model. They combine operational excellence with continuous innovation, embedding exploration as a structural capability rather than a peripheral activity. This approach enables them to thrive across multiple S-curves, creating growth, resilience, and long-term value.

The new “Dual OS” 

The core challenge for modern organisations is the tension between exploitation and exploration. Exploitation focuses on maximising efficiency, scale, and profitability from the existing business. Exploration focuses on discovering new products, services, markets, and business models that will drive future growth. Historically, companies have prioritised one at the expense of the other, often to their detriment.

The Dual OS resolves this tension structurally. It embeds two operating systems within the same organisation, each with distinct processes, metrics, and culture, but aligned through a strategic nexus. The exploit system delivers predictable performance, sustaining revenues and cash flow. The explore system drives experimentation, prototyping, and learning, ensuring the organisation identifies and climbs the next S-curve before competitors.

Importantly, the Dual OS is not simply about innovation teams or R&D labs. It is about making duality a structural capability. It recognises that exploration and exploitation are inherently different: they operate on different timescales, with different metrics, rhythms, and organisational behaviours. Yet they are integrated under one strategy, ensuring insights from exploration can influence the core, and resources from the core can fuel experimentation.

Why the “Single OS” fails

Traditional organisational structures are optimised for stability and efficiency. They reward execution, predictability, and risk management. These qualities are essential for operational success but can stifle innovation and strategic flexibility. Past success often becomes a liability. Processes, systems, and routines that generated growth yesterday can constrain responses to emerging opportunities. But they hand on to the success formulae of yesterday, hoping it still works tomorrow.

This is not hypothetical. Even global leaders, one hero companies, are vulnerable.

WPP, once the world’s largest marketing group, exemplifies this. Its strength lay in creativity, brand management, and global scale. Yet these same capabilities delayed the adoption of AI-driven, data-enabled marketing platforms. By the time WPP attempted to pivot, tech-savvy competitors had already redefined the industry.

GE faced similar challenges. Its operational excellence in industrial machinery and energy systems became insufficient as markets shifted toward software, digital services, and platform-based solutions. Despite attempts to transform, GE struggled to reinvent fast enough to maintain market leadership.

Nokia missed the smartphone revolution. Its hardware expertise and global market share were formidable, yet the company failed to adapt to new ecosystem-based competition from Apple and Android, illustrating the danger of focusing solely on exploitation without structural exploration.

These cases demonstrate a critical lesson: delivering today is necessary but not sufficient. Organisations must also invent tomorrow structurally, deliberately, and continuously.

Riding the S-Curves … how business reinvents

To understand why structural reinvention is critical, it is useful to consider S-curves. Every product, service, or business follows a lifecycle:

  • Emergence: Growth is slow as capabilities, markets, and customer adoption develop.

  • Acceleration: Growth accelerates rapidly as market fit, distribution, and scale converge.

  • Maturity: Growth slows as markets saturate and competition intensifies.

  • Decline: Without new S-curves, revenues, profitability, and relevance erode.

The S-curve framework highlights why exploitation alone is insufficient. Even high-performing organisations eventually reach the plateau of their current curve. Riding the next S-curve is essential for continued growth and market relevance.

What’s even more significant is that companies need to change before they have to – while things are going well, but also while they have profit and power.

Companies that fail to anticipate or pursue new S-curves often succumb to disruption: they are slow to innovate, clinging to mature business models while new entrants disrupt and redefine markets.

The Dual OS … Exploit and Explore, and Connect

The Dual OS creates two distinct but interconnected systems inside the organisation. This builds on work by the likes of Scott Anthony’s Dual Transformation, and Alex Osterwalder’s Invincible Business, regarding the two dimensions not just as portfolios but as systems, with a connecting bridge :

1. The Exploit System

This system manages the core business. It delivers the performance, profitability, and scale required for short- and medium-term success. It is optimised for reliability and efficiency. Its strengths include:

  • Repeatable processes

  • Clear roles and responsibilities

  • Well-understood metrics

  • Risk minimisation

  • Robust governance

The exploit system is essential. Without it, there is no foundation for growth.

2. The Explore System

This system creates the future. It focuses on discovering emerging opportunities, experimenting with new business models, and testing ideas that could become tomorrow’s sources of revenue. Its strengths include:

  • Speed and agility

  • Iteration and learning

  • Cross-functional collaboration

  • Customer-driven experimentation

  • Comfort with ambiguity

Unlike traditional “innovation labs,” the explore system is not a peripheral activity—it is a structural component of the organisation, of teams, or sometimes a dual mindset within the same role and person.

3. The Nexus

The nexus is the connective tissue between exploit and explore. It ensures both systems are aligned, mutually supportive, and strategically coordinated. The nexus includes:

  • Shared leadership oversight

  • Common purpose and ambition

  • Governance and resource allocation mechanisms

  • Digital platforms that share data, insights, and learning

  • Transition pathways to scale new ideas into the core business

Without the nexus, companies risk fragmentation: core teams ignore innovation, innovation teams lose credibility, and promising ideas struggle to scale.

Dual OS in Action

There are many models of Dual OS in action, sometimes creating separate organisation structures, sometimes aligning within teams, and holding the duality in their mindsets. What is clear is that it is more that creating a separate team to explore the future, it requires an alignment of both perspectives so that the business thrives today and tomorrow, together.

Here are some examples:

Amazon … Dual OS to experiment at scale

Amazon integrates operational excellence with a rigorous exploration engine.

  • Exploit system: Retail logistics, inventory management, AWS infrastructure.

  • Explore system: Alexa, cashierless stores, drone delivery, and AWS expansions.

  • Tools and approaches: Leadership principles guiding experiments, controlled pilots, real-time telemetry, and clear scaling criteria.

  • Impact: Amazon converts experimental ideas into billion-dollar businesses without disrupting core operations.

BYD … Dual OS to simultaneously grow in multiple industries

BYD started as an automative manufacturer, then added battery manufacturing, the combined its expertise in both to become a leader in electric vehicles, renewable energy, and integrated mobility solutions.

  • Exploit system: Battery and automotive manufacturing operations deliver scale and reliability.

  • Explore system: Electric vehicles, energy storage solutions, and international market expansion.

  • Tools and approaches: Cross-functional project teams, rapid prototyping, vertical integration for experimentation, and agile supply-chain innovations.

  • Impact: BYD has scaled multiple business models in parallel, positioning itself as a global leader in both mobility and clean energy.

DBS Bank … Dual OS for digital reinvention

DBS evolved from a traditional banking model into a digitally-driven financial institution. This wasn’t just about automation but strategic reinvention – creating the invisible bank, transforming purpose and ways of working – helping people “live more, bank less” with an ecosystem model of embedded finance

  • Exploit system: Retail, corporate, and wealth management services remain operationally excellent.

  • Explore system: Agile squads use design thinking to prototype mobile banking solutions, AI-driven advisory, and integrated customer experiences.

  • Tools and approaches: Innovation labs, sandbox environments for rapid testing, iterative user research, and transition pathways to scale successful experiments.

  • Impact: DBS increased digital adoption dramatically, reduced operational costs, and launched new customer-centric services without compromising traditional banking performance.

Mercado Libre … Dual OS for continuous adaptation in emerging markets

Mercado Libre is Latin America’s largest e-commerce and fintech company. Marcos Galperin’s idea started on a Stanford exec education program, a project to create an eBay-type marketplace in Latin America. This then evolved into a full e-commerce platform and logistics business, and now into a leading financial services platform.

  • Exploit system: Marketplace and payment operations maintain scale and reliability.

  • Explore system: Fintech lending, logistics experimentation, AI-driven recommendation engines, and cross-border commerce.

  • Tools and approaches: Agile squads, data-driven decision-making, continuous experimentation, and localised market adaptation.

  • Impact: Mercado Libre thrives in volatile markets, rapidly iterating solutions that competitors struggle to match.

Philips … Dual OS to reinvent the business, from electronics to healthcare

Philips has continuously repositioned itself over decades. Once best known as a lighting business, it diversified into many sectors, and now has a refocus through divestment and innovation, as a health tech business.

  • Exploit system: Lighting, imaging, and patient-monitoring operations.

  • Explore system: AI-driven diagnostic tools, connected health platforms, and telemedicine services.

  • Tools and approaches: Customer co-creation, agile design teams, real-time market feedback, and strategic divestment of non-core businesses.

  • Impact: Philips became a health technology leader while reducing dependence on commoditised electronics.

Ping An … Dual OS to create a portfolio of new businesses beyond the core

Ping A shifted from a traditional insurer into a digital-first platform spanning insurance, banking, health, and mobility. Good Doctor, for example, is now the world’s leading healthcare platform, an ecosystem of many partners, where PingAn leverages it IP and network or relationships to thrive and grow:

  • Exploit system: Core insurance operations maintain risk management, compliance, and profitability.

  • Explore system: AI-powered health diagnostics, telemedicine platforms, fintech innovations, and mobility services.

  • Tools and approaches: Shared data platforms, advanced analytics, cross-unit innovation councils, and leadership forums.

  • Impact: Ping An now generates multiple new revenue streams while sustaining insurance profits, climbing several S-curves simultaneously. Its organisational culture embraces digital-first experimentation, with clear integration into operational decision-making.

Schneider Electric … Dual OS to shift from products to services

Schneider Electric moved from traditional electrical equipment to digital energy management solutions. The French company is repeatedly ranked as the world’s most sustainable company, accelerating the transition to clean energy:

  • Exploit system: Operationally excellent power and automation equipment production.

  • Explore system: IoT-enabled building management, AI-driven energy optimisation, and renewable energy solutions.

  • Tools and approaches: Digital twins, predictive analytics, agile development teams, and cross-market experimentation labs.

  • Impact: Schneider now captures digital revenue streams, improves operational efficiency, and accelerates adoption of sustainable solutions across markets.

Tata Group … Dual OS to orchestrate multiple horizons

India’s Tata Group operates across diverse industries, from automotive and power to digital platforms and consumer services – with brands as diverse as Range Rover and Tetley Tea.

  • Exploit system: Core industrial operations maintain global efficiency and scale.

  • Explore system: Tata Digital, Tata EVs, renewable energy, and AI-driven service platforms.

  • Tools and approaches: Strategic portfolio management, innovation hubs, and cross-company intrapreneurship programs.

  • Impact: Tata balances legacy operations with emerging ventures, continuously reshaping its portfolio for long-term relevance.

Spotify … Dual OS to drive agility and continuous innovation.

Spotify has been a genuine disruptor of the music industry, challenging the traditional dominance of record labels and fixed formats. It continues to innovate around artists and communities, curating its music content in innovative and dynamic ways. It has reimagined product development through the squad-tribe model.

  • Exploit system: Core music streaming service continues reliable delivery.

  • Explore system: New features, creator tools, podcast and audio innovation.

  • Tools and approaches: Distributed cross-functional squads, continuous A/B testing, metrics for engagement and adoption, rapid iteration cycles.

  • Impact: Spotify maintains a dominant music platform while rapidly launching new services and features aligned with customer trends.

How to implement a Dual OS

1. Define a Purposeful Ambition

Every Dual OS begins with a long-term ambition—a “north star” that clarifies why the organisation exists and what it aims to achieve in the next decade. This ambition anchors both exploitation and exploration. It ensures operational teams understand how their work contributes to the future and gives innovation teams direction and boundaries.

Purpose must shape strategic choices: which markets to enter, which capabilities to build, and which risks to embrace. It must also guide resource allocation, ensuring that exploration receives meaningful investment without undermining operational priorities.

2. Build Distinct Operating Models

Exploitation and exploration cannot operate with the same metrics, culture, time horizon, or governance. They require distinct operating models that reflect their fundamentally different purposes.

The exploit system prioritises operational excellence: predictable delivery, process discipline, and performance against established KPIs. The explore system prioritises learning, speed, and iteration. Success for exploration is not measured by revenue but by validated insights, customer adoption signals, technical feasibility, and strategic potential.

Companies must create autonomous teams for exploration—free from the constraints of core operational metrics—while ensuring alignment through shared ambition and governance.

3. Design Nexus Mechanisms

The nexus is where most organisations succeed or fail. It must include intentional structures that bring exploitation and exploration together. These might include:

  • Leadership councils that review both core business performance and innovation portfolio progress

  • Shared data and analytics platforms that enable a common understanding of customer behaviour

  • Governance processes that decide which experiments to scale

  • Cultural rituals that reinforce shared values and strategic alignment

The nexus ensures that exploration isn’t marginalised and that the core business doesn’t become ossified.

4. Create Transition Pathways

The transition from explore to exploit is where most innovation dies. To avoid this, companies must create clear, repeatable pathways for scaling new ideas.

They must define criteria for what constitutes a scalable innovation, use pilot programs to test assumptions, and assign cross-functional managers to oversee integration. They must document learnings, create playbooks, and build capabilities that allow successful transitions to become routine rather than exceptional.

5. Adopt a Portfolio Mindset

Organisations must manage multiple horizons simultaneously:

  • Horizon 1: the core business

  • Horizon 2: adjacent growth

  • Horizon 3: future bets

Capital, talent, and leadership attention must be allocated intentionally across horizons. A portfolio mindset ensures balance, resilience, and ongoing strategic renewal.

6. Embed Culture and Leadership for Duality

Culture is the foundation of the Dual OS. Leaders must create psychological safety, encourage experimentation, reward learning, and embrace iteration. They must model curiosity, openness, and humility.

Leadership in a Dual OS requires the ability to operate in two modes: disciplined execution and creative exploration. Leaders must encourage both, navigate tensions, and orchestrate collaboration across systems.

7. Use Technology as an Enabler

Technology underpins the Dual OS. AI, analytics, and digital platforms accelerate experimentation, improve decision-making, and enable real-time feedback. They connect teams, distribute insights, and reduce barriers between exploitation and exploration.

But technology is only effective when supported by culture and governance. It is the combination of all three—technology, culture, and structure—that unleashes the full power of duality.

Growth, Reinvention, and Sustained Value

The Dual OS is not simply a model for innovation; it is a platform for sustained growth and value creation. Companies that adopt it effectively rise above disruption. They ride multiple S-curves, turning uncertainty into opportunity, and reinvent themselves continuously.

Nvidia offers a powerful illustration. Its original GPU business represents the exploit system: a highly efficient, globally scaled operation. But its explore system enabled Nvidia to venture into artificial intelligence, autonomous vehicles, data-centre platforms, and generative models. These explorations created entirely new markets and catapulted the company to extraordinary heights. Between 2016 and 2025, Nvidia’s market cap grew from around £30 billion to more than £5 trillion. This was not luck; it was structural reinvention.

Similarly, the experiences of Ping An, DBS, Amazon, and BYD demonstrate that continuous exploration—aligned with operational excellence—is not only possible but essential. These companies deliver today while inventing tomorrow. They build resilience, unlock new value, and shape markets instead of reacting to them.

Dual OS … The Blueprint for the Future

The Dual OS represents a fundamental shift in how organisations think about strategy, structure, and leadership. It acknowledges that performance and innovation are not competing priorities but mutually reinforcing capabilities. It recognises that exploration and exploitation require different mindsets, metrics, and mechanisms—but can be orchestrated within one organisation. And it makes reinvention not a crisis response but a continuous, structural capability.

In a world of relentless change, companies must become masters of duality. They must be both disciplined and creative, efficient and adaptive, confident and curious. The Dual OS is the blueprint for organisations that want to thrive in this world—those that seek not just to survive disruption but to harness it as a source of enduring growth and value.

The organisations that embrace this model will outperform, out-innovate, and outlast those that do not. They will deliver today while creating tomorrow. And they will define the future of business.

Explore more …

And also …

In a world of dramatic, accelerating change, family offices are undergoing a profound transformation.  No longer confined to the administration of wealth, these private institutions have become strategic engines for investment, innovation, and enterprise growth.

At the heart of this evolution is AI, which is not merely a technological tool but a catalyst reshaping the way family offices operate, the decisions next leaders make, and the capabilities they must cultivate to steward and expand family wealth.

For the younger generation of leaders – those poised to inherit, manage, or modernise family offices  – AI offers both opportunity and obligation.  It challenges conventional practices while enabling entirely new approaches to strategy, leadership, and value creation.

However this is not simply about becoming adept at AI, but about how AI connects with where and how to invest and manage those investments – to reimagine the role of the family office, its vision and strategy, investments and activities – in a dynamic, intelligent world.

We explore how AI is transforming family offices, what this means for next generation leaders, and how they can harness these tools to create enduring impact for their families and enterprises.

What is a family office?

First, a definition.

Family offices are private structures established by wealthy families to manage their financial affairs in a coordinated, institutional way. Globally, there are estimated to be around 8,000 such entities, with numbers continuing to grow as wealth increases and becomes more complex. While there is no single formal definition, a family office typically becomes viable once a family’s wealth reaches at least $100–250 million, with many overseeing several hundred million to multiple billions in assets.

In practice, a family office usually consists of a small, dedicated team—often around 10–25 professionals—responsible for investment management, governance, tax planning, and long-term wealth preservation. Operating costs vary with scale but generally represent a modest percentage of assets.

A key advantage of a family office is the separation it creates between family wealth and any underlying operating business. This enables more disciplined investment decisions, improved diversification, clearer succession planning, and stronger governance—supporting the preservation and growth of wealth across generations.

AI as a transformative force in family offices

Family offices have historically focused on wealth preservation, tax optimisation, and investment management. Yet the contemporary landscape demands more than operational excellence; it requires foresight, agility, and the capacity to identify and capture opportunities in a rapidly shifting global environment. AI serves as a transformative force across three critical dimensions: decision intelligence, operational efficiency, and strategic foresight.

Decision intelligence

At its core, AI provides the family office with unprecedented decision intelligence. By leveraging vast datasets, machine learning algorithms, and predictive analytics, AI allows leaders to anticipate market movements, assess risk, and identify opportunity with far greater precision than traditional approaches.

Consider a multi-generational European family office with significant exposure to equities, private equity, and real estate. Historically, investment committees relied heavily on quarterly reporting, analyst briefings, and personal judgement honed over decades. Today, AI-driven platforms can continuously analyse global market trends, macroeconomic indicators, and asset performance, flagging risks or opportunities weeks or even months in advance. A sudden policy shift affecting renewable energy subsidies, for example, can trigger automated scenario analyses, guiding the family office in adjusting portfolios in real time.

For NextGen leaders, this is a paradigm shift. Rather than relying solely on the instincts and experience of previous generations, they can now make informed, high-impact decisions guided by AI insights, while still embedding family values and long-term vision. AI does not replace judgment; it amplifies it. Leaders move from reactive decision-making to strategic orchestration.

Operational efficiency

AI also streamlines operations, reducing the time and effort devoted to routine tasks, reporting, compliance, and risk management. Advanced dashboards integrate data across portfolios, jurisdictions, and asset classes, providing real-time visibility into cash flows, tax exposures, compliance obligations, and even philanthropic outcomes.

For instance, a Singapore-based family office with extensive global investments can use AI to monitor currency fluctuations, interest rates, and regulatory changes simultaneously. Where previously a team of analysts would spend weeks producing quarterly reports, AI generates actionable insights instantaneously, freeing leadership to focus on strategy, relationship-building, and long-term vision. This operational leverage is especially valuable for NextGen leaders, who must balance stewardship of the family legacy with the demands of innovation and enterprise growth.

Strategic foresight

Perhaps most profoundly, AI enables strategic foresight. Beyond analysing historical data, AI tools can scan thousands of startup deals, patents, scientific papers, and market signals to identify emerging trends, innovation gaps, and potential new markets. Natural language processing, for example, can identify shifts in consumer sentiment or early signals of disruptive technologies in sectors aligned with the family enterprise.

A case in point: a Middle Eastern family office historically invested in energy infrastructure. Using AI to monitor global patent filings, policy developments, and venture capital trends, the next gen leadership identifies an emergent opportunity in green hydrogen technologies. By investing early in a portfolio of startups aligned with the family’s existing industrial competencies, they not only preserve legacy but also create new avenues for growth.

Strategically, this positions NextGen leaders as proactive stewards, capable of spotting opportunities before competitors, navigating disruption, and aligning AI-driven insights with long-term family vision.

How AI will shape the role of next leaders

AI changes not just what family offices do, but who NextGen leaders need to be. Traditional next gen roles often emphasised learning the family business, executing operational responsibilities, and maintaining continuity. In an AI-enabled world, the expectations are fundamentally different. Leaders must evolve from executors to strategists, from operational managers to ecosystem builders, and from isolated decision-makers to orchestrators of collaborative intelligence.

From Executor to Strategist

The first transformation is conceptual: next gen leaders move from executing tasks to interpreting AI-driven insights and making scenario-based decisions.

Consider a London-based family office overseeing a diversified portfolio of real estate, venture capital, and public equities. Previously, a successor might spend months manually reviewing reports to understand portfolio exposure. With AI-enabled risk simulations, however, the leader can test multiple scenarios—such as interest rate changes or sector-specific disruptions—and rapidly decide whether to pivot a venture, increase exposure to high-growth areas, or divest underperforming assets.

The practical implication is profound: leaders now integrate AI insights into strategic planning and portfolio decisions, balancing analytical rigor with the family’s values and long-term goals.

From Operational Focus to Ecosystem Builder

AI also expands the scope of leadership from managing operations to curating an ecosystem of assets, ventures, and partnerships. By identifying connections between industries, markets, and networks, AI enables leaders to make more informed choices about where to invest, innovate, or collaborate.

A concrete example comes from a Hong Kong family office investing in luxury retail. AI analytics reveal emerging consumer behaviour trends in Asia, alongside potential synergy with tech-enabled supply chain solutions. Using these insights, the NextGen leader facilitates minority investments in high-growth e-commerce startups that complement the family’s traditional business, fostering innovation while preserving legacy.

This shift emphasises the orchestration of complex networks, where AI provides the intelligence, but the human leader curates, negotiates, and activates opportunities.

From Individual Insight to Collaborative Intelligence

Finally, AI encourages leaders to move from isolated insight to collaborative intelligence, integrating knowledge across teams, advisors, and enterprise units. Cohesion and alignment are vital: AI may generate insights, but translating them into actionable strategies requires leadership that bridges generational perspectives and aligns stakeholders around shared goals.

For instance, a next gen leader in a European family office might use AI to identify potential gaps in talent, innovation, or market coverage. They then coordinate across family executives, business units, and external advisors to implement initiatives, ensuring insights become real-world impact rather than abstract reports.

Practical shifts for next leaders

AI is not an abstract tool, it drives tangible shifts in how next leaders operate, with clear implications across investments, enterprise growth, governance, philanthropy, and leadership development.

These shifts highlight that AI does not replace the leader but enhances their capacity to create value, innovate, and steward legacy.

Examples of AI in action for family offices

Financière Agache, the Arnault family office

Financière Agache, the family office of the Arnault family, stewards the wealth and strategic holdings behind LVMH, one of Europe’s most prominent luxury groups. Traditionally focused on preserving and growing legacy luxury assets, the office has evolved into a forward-looking investment vehicle, increasingly leveraging technology and data to drive value creation across sectors. Under the leadership of Frédéric Arnault, the next generation, the office has embraced AI and analytics as strategic enablers, using digital insights to assess investments, optimise risk, and evaluate complex global asset portfolios.

AI is not merely a tool but a lens for decision-making. Financière Agache integrates data-driven scenario modelling, predictive analytics, and operational dashboards to identify opportunities in luxury, digital platforms, and tech-enabled ventures. AI supports everything from personalised customer engagement strategies in portfolio companies to forecasting macro and sectoral trends, allowing leadership to act proactively rather than reactively.

NextGen leadership has also influenced the office’s strategic posture, advocating for technology-aligned, mission-driven investments that balance legacy preservation with growth and innovation. By embedding AI into both investment analysis and operational planning, Financière Agache exemplifies how a heritage European family office can combine tradition, foresight, and digital insight, empowering the next generation to steward wealth, drive innovation, and capture emerging opportunities in a rapidly changing world.

Kirkbi, the Kristiansen family office

Kirkbi A/S, the family office of the Kristiansen family, stewards the wealth and legacy of the Lego Group. While its foundation has always been on preserving the family’s long-term interests, the office has evolved into a strategic, globally aware investment vehicle, reflecting broader trends in European family offices. Kirkbi’s portfolio now spans renewable energy, climate infrastructure, private equity, and select technology ventures, signalling a shift from traditional asset preservation toward future-oriented, value-creation investing.

AI and digitalisation have become strategic enablers rather than isolated tools. Though Kirkbi does not publicly disclose internal systems, industry trends suggest that next generation leaders are driving adoption of data analytics, predictive modelling, and scenario-planning platforms to support portfolio decisions. These tools allow leadership to monitor global markets, assess risk dynamically, and optimise capital deployment efficiently.

Next generation influence is particularly notable: younger family principals advocate for mission-aligned investments, technology adoption, and sustainability-driven strategies, combining Lego’s heritage with emerging opportunities. Digital workflows enable faster decision-making, operational transparency, and integration of external advisors and ecosystem partners.

Kirkbi illustrates how a legacy-focused European family office can combine stewardship, innovation, and digital insight, enabling NextGen leaders to preserve the family’s values while actively shaping the long-term growth and relevance of the family’s capital.

D11Z, the Schwarz family office

D11Z is the single-family office of the Schwarz family, owners of the global retail conglomerate Lidl and Kaufland. Traditionally, family offices like D11Z focused on wealth preservation and operational oversight, but the office has transformed into a strategic, innovation-driven vehicle with global reach. Its investment philosophy emphasises early-stage ventures in AI-enabled B2B technologies, green tech, and advanced analytics, reflecting the family’s desire to actively create long-term value while anticipating structural market shifts.

The office leverages proprietary data and analytical tools to identify high-potential startups, track emerging industry trends, and simulate portfolio outcomes. AI and advanced analytics are integrated into deal sourcing, risk management, and scenario planning, enabling faster, more informed decision-making. This is not merely automation; it represents a shift toward data-driven strategic foresight, where human judgment is augmented by AI insights.

NextGen leaders play a central role in this transformation, advocating for technology adoption, hiring data-savvy teams, and engaging with founders and innovation ecosystems directly. Their influence has accelerated the adoption of AI-enabled workflows and investment models, embedding foresight and agility into the office’s operations.

D11Z exemplifies how a modern European single-family office can transition from passive wealth stewardship to active, tech-informed investment leadership, empowering the next generation to steward family capital with innovation, insight, and long-term strategic vision.

Here are some more examples of how AI is reshaping the family office:

  • AI-Enabled Investment Platforms
    AI platforms can analyse thousands of private equity, venture capital, or real estate opportunities in real time, identifying niche, high-growth opportunities that align with family values or legacy industries. A family office in Zurich, for example, uses AI to identify early-stage clean-tech startups, enabling strategic minority stakes before competitors even become aware of them.

  • AI for Family Enterprise Strategy
    AI tools can scan global supply chains, consumer trends, and competitor actions, recommending new business models or product innovations. A Middle Eastern industrial family office predicted a shift toward sustainable energy demand and pivoted to complementary green technology investments, capturing growth without compromising legacy operations.

  • Operational Transformation
    Automation of treasury, reporting, compliance, and risk management accelerates decision-making. Using AI dashboards, a London-based NextGen leader can review cash flow scenarios, stress-test investments, and reallocate capital within hours rather than weeks, enabling more agile, informed governance.

  • Scenario-Based Legacy Planning
    AI models multiple succession and governance scenarios, allowing NextGen leaders to simulate consequences and optimise intergenerational planning. A family office in Singapore used AI to model potential leadership transitions across business units and philanthropic ventures, ensuring continuity while enabling growth initiatives.

 

The takeaways for next leaders

AI is an amplifier of impact, not a replacement for human judgment. It shifts the NextGen role from operational manager to strategic orchestrator, combining three core competencies:

  • Vision and stewardship – Aligning AI insights with family values, long-term vision, and multi-generational responsibility.

  • Innovation and growth – Using predictive and analytical tools to expand enterprises, invest strategically, and create new value.

  • Leadership and capability – Cultivating adaptive, collaborative teams capable of acting on AI-driven insights while maintaining ethical oversight.

Leaders who embrace AI as a transformation enabler are positioned to lead more effectively, protect family legacy, and generate new value in ways that previous generations could not. The next era of family enterprise leadership is not defined by wealth alone but by the ability to harness technology, navigate disruption, and orchestrate human and machine intelligence in pursuit of enduring impact.

Stepping up 

The world of UHNW family offices is changing. Generational wealth is no longer managed solely through tradition and intuition; it is shaped by insights derived from vast data, predictive algorithms, and AI-driven foresight. For next gen leaders, the challenge is clear: they must learn to interpret, integrate, and act on these insights, bridging human judgment with technological intelligence.

In practice, this means redefining what it is to be a family office leader. Decisions are faster, more informed, and more precise; operations are streamlined, freeing capacity for strategy and growth; and foresight becomes predictive, enabling leaders to act before disruption arrives. AI is not a silver bullet, but for those who embrace it as a strategic enabler, it becomes a lever for stewardship, innovation, and enduring legacy.

The future of UHNW family offices, and the families they serve, will be shaped not by AI alone, but by next gen leaders who know how to wield it wisely. Those who do so will steward their legacies with insight, courage, and creativity, ensuring their family enterprises thrive across generations in a world defined by change.

There comes a moment in every ambitious career when the familiar contours of the job begin to dissolve. The inbox is still full, the meetings still arrive with unrelenting regularity, but something feels subtly different. People look to you less for answers and more for direction. You begin to sense that decisions are no longer confined to the boundaries of your function; they ripple across teams, products, countries, and markets. The horizon, once comfortably contained within your remit, stretches disconcertingly far.

This is the moment where a person stands on the precipice of one of the most important transformations in professional life: the leap from manager to leader. For many, it arrives quietly. It is not heralded by grand announcements or new business cards. Rather, it is noticed in the sudden shift of weight on your shoulders, in the questions that now carry wider consequences, and in the dawning realisation that the skills that made you successful may no longer be enough.

The transition is often romanticised in leadership books and HR presentations, yet those who experience it know it as a deeply human pivot. It requires courage, not simply because the responsibilities multiply, but because the identity must evolve. A manager’s excellence lies in competence. A leader’s excellence lies in perspective, poise, purpose, and the ability to bring out the best in others. It is a profound change of role, mindset, and capability.

This article explores that change: the practical shift in responsibilities, the inner journey of mindset, the new capabilities demanded, and examples of European business leaders who have made this transition and articulated its impact.

From technical specialist to strategic generalist

Managers grow up through functional mastery. They become the best engineer in the department, the sharpest financial analyst, the most dependable operations supervisor. Their reputations are built on answers, speed, accuracy, and a deep familiarity with their craft.

But leadership does not reward expertise alone. Rather, it rewards the ability to mobilise many experts, to balance competing interests, and to build a view of the organisation that transcends any one part of it.

One of the clearest illustrations of this shift comes from Carsten Spohr, who moved from a technical and operational background to become the Chief Executive of Lufthansa. He has spoken often about the moment he realised that the airline could no longer be managed merely as an operationally excellent transport business; it had to be shaped as an interconnected ecosystem of brands, services, partnerships, talent, and long-term capability. His expertise in flying and operations was no longer the centre of his value. Instead, his value became the ability to interpret the future of aviation, navigate labour relations, digitalise the airline, and rebuild trust after crises.

The transition from functional to holistic thinking is not a simple widening of responsibility. It is a reconfiguration of identity. Leaders must become strategic generalists who think in systems rather than silos. This requires an ability to connect dots across markets, people, technology, and culture. It requires the humility to know what you do not know, and the willingness to surround yourself with those who complement your blind spots.

In many European organisations—often older, more complex, and more decentralised than their American counterparts—this shift is particularly pronounced. Leadership means orchestrating diversity: of countries, languages, regulatory regimes, and cultural expectations. The leader becomes not only a strategist, but a translator, mediator, and integrator.

From functional advocate to organisation champion

Managers understand success as the performance of their team. Leaders understand success as the strengthening of the entire enterprise.

This is one of the most difficult shifts to master, because it requires a loosening of emotional attachment to one’s own function. Where once you might have lobbied fiercely for more budget for your area, leadership requires recognising that the greater priority might lie elsewhere. The leader does not win by defending their territory, but by allocating resources where they create the greatest overall value.

Few have articulated this better than Emma Walmsley, Chief Executive of GSK, who stepped from managing a consumer-health division to leading one of Europe’s most complex pharmaceutical groups. She has described leadership as the discipline of thinking in decades rather than quarters, and the responsibility of making decisions not only for the areas she once knew intimately, but for the enterprise as a whole. Leading GSK meant breaking down silos between research, manufacturing, commercial teams, and external partners, and creating alignment across a company whose value rests not only in products but in science, talent, and reputation.

Enterprise leadership also requires wrestling with trade-offs. Sustainability versus profitability. Investment versus efficiency. Innovation versus risk. Leaders navigate these tensions by elevating their thinking beyond departmental performance, examining how the different parts of the business interplay, and shaping the organisational architecture needed for long-term success.

This shift is particularly visible in companies that are reimagining themselves for new realities. Nils Andersen, who rose through the ranks to become the leader of A.P. Moller–Maersk, speaks of the moment he recognised that the company’s future was not in managing ships, but in orchestrating global supply chains. The enterprise view transformed every decision: from digital strategy to capital allocation to the carbon transition.

From short-term deliverer to long-term value creator

Managers excel at delivering results. Leaders excel at creating value. The difference may seem subtle, but it is profound.

Short-term performance depends on control, efficiency, and meeting targets. Long-term value creation depends on building capabilities, cultures, platforms, and partnerships that allow an organisation to endure and evolve.

This shift demands patience and perspective. It requires the courage to invest in innovation, digital transformation, talent development, and sustainability even when the immediate financial returns are uncertain. It requires holding a steady course in the face of quarterly pressure, crisis, or ambiguity.

A compelling example comes from Hélène Rey, Chair of the Board at BNP Paribas, who has emphasised that leadership in modern organisations means stewarding the institution not merely for shareholders, but for society and future generations. In large European banks—often more regulated, more scrutinised, and more embedded in national ecosystems—the long-term view is not a luxury but a necessity.

Similarly, Frans van Houten, former CEO of Philips, led one of Europe’s most significant corporate transformations, shifting the company from diversified industrial conglomerate to focused health-technology leader. He has spoken about the discipline required to resist the gravitational pull of short-term earnings, instead investing in digital health, connected care, and organisational renewal. The leader became an architect of future value, not a caretaker of today’s results.

The Inner Shift: Leadership as a way of being

If the practical changes are visible, the psychological ones are far more subtle. Many new leaders describe the transition as an emotional unravelling, followed by a reconstruction of self.

A manager’s identity is often built around expertise, certainty, and action. A leader’s identity must be grounded in curiosity, humility, and influence.

Where managers gain confidence from knowing, leaders gain confidence from navigating the unknown. They must be comfortable being uncomfortable. They must be willing to ask questions rather than provide answers, to invite challenge rather than suppress dissent, to trust rather than direct.

Ilham Kadri, CEO of Syensqo and former CEO of Solvay, has spoken eloquently about this internal transition. Coming from a scientific and operational background, she realised that leadership meant shifting from problem-solving to possibility-shaping, from managing complexity to inspiring clarity, from proving her competence to amplifying the competence of everyone around her.

The psychological journey is not simply an expansion of responsibility; it is a reorientation of how one sees oneself in the world. The leader becomes a sense-maker, storyteller, and catalyst. They operate with a steadiness that others rely upon. They hold paradoxes without being paralysed by them. They create confidence not by providing certainty, but by offering direction and meaning.

The New Capabilities: What modern leaders must develop

The modern European leader requires a set of capabilities that are broader, deeper, and more multifaceted than ever before.

One is strategic acumen. This is not merely understanding strategy documents or market analysis; it is the ability to see patterns, connect ideas, and articulate a forward-looking narrative that gives the organisation coherence and purpose.

Another is enterprise thinking, the capacity to balance competing priorities, allocate resources wisely, and make decisions that strengthen the organisation as a whole.

A third is talent orchestration. Leadership today is less about managing people and more about mobilising them—connecting individuals with missions that energise them, building teams that blend skills and perspectives, and nurturing cultures where creativity and performance thrive.

A fourth is storytelling. In large, complex organisations spanning multiple markets and cultures, the leader’s narrative becomes the thread that aligns and inspires. It is through storytelling that leaders communicate priorities, express values, and create energy for change.

And, perhaps above all, leadership requires courage. Courage to confront uncomfortable truths. Courage to choose the long term over the expedient. Courage to take risks when the rewards are unclear. Courage to speak, to act, and to stand still when necessary.

This is not theatrical bravery. It is the everyday courage of staying true to a vision, of holding steady through criticism, of leading in ambiguity, and of trusting others.

What the transition feels like

Leaders often speak of a disconcerting period where the old certainties dissolve but the new ones have not yet appeared. This is a natural part of the evolution.

  • You lose the comfort of expertise, because leadership demands that you make decisions far outside your technical domain.
  • You become more visible, because people read every gesture, tone, and comment.
  • You become the integrator, resolving tensions between teams that once sat comfortably outside your remit.
  • You slow down your thinking, because leaders must rise above the swirl of daily operations to focus on longer-term direction.
  • And you begin to see the world differently, recognising that your influence lies not in doing more, but in enabling others to thrive.

European leaders often speak about this with striking candour. Jean-Dominique Senard, Chairman of Renault, once explained that the most disorienting part of leadership was not the scale of responsibility, but the shift from having a narrow field of control to guiding an organisation through persuasion, coherence, and integrity.

Leadership, he said, is not an assertion of power, but an expression of stewardship.

Leaders who have made the leap

Many of Europe’s contemporary business leaders exemplify the transformation from manager to leader.

Ana Botín, Executive Chair of Santander, moved from leading country operations to reshaping one of Europe’s largest banking groups. She has spoken of how leadership required not only strategic renewal but cultural renewal—building a more innovative, open, and internationally connected bank.

Bjørn Gulden, who led Puma before becoming CEO of Adidas, made the leap from operational manager to brand builder, cultural architect, and enterprise leader. His tenure emphasised the importance of purpose, team dynamics, and long-term brand equity over short-term performance.

Carlo Messina, leader of Intesa Sanpaolo, transitioned from finance professional to enterprise strategist, balancing profitability with social programmes, regional development, and digital transformation—an example of leadership attuned to the broader societal role of European institutions.

Ilham Kadri, Emma Walmsley, Carsten Spohr, and Frans van Houten similarly show that leadership in modern European organisations is not merely about commercial success but about shaping long-term value, building trust, and steering complex enterprises with vision and humanity.

The courageous leap forward

Stepping from manager to leader is one of the most courageous transitions in professional life, not because the tasks become harder, but because the expectations become deeper. Leadership demands a broader view, a longer horizon, and a willingness to transcend the very expertise that once defined you.

To lead is to see the enterprise as an interconnected system, to create value that endures, to elevate the performance and potential of others, and to hold steady in uncertainty.

It requires humility, curiosity, courage, and a commitment to something larger than oneself.

The world today—volatile, interconnected, opportunity-rich, and uncertain—needs leaders who are equal parts strategist, architect, and steward. Leaders who embrace possibilities, unite people, build platforms for progress, and imagine futures that others cannot yet see.

The leap from manager to leader is not simply a step upward. It is a step forward—into a future that you have the opportunity, and the responsibility, to shape.

Explore more …

And also …

The entire concept of a business is being reimagined before our eyes. And the ways of leading it too. The pace of change is staggering, fuelled by exponential technologies, generational shifts, and a deeper search for meaning. But beneath the surface, something more profound is happening: a revolution in the way we think about organisations, leadership, and value itself.

Over the last 12 months I have worked with inspiring business leaders across the world – from Campari to Cartier, Mercedes and Microsoft, Nestlé to NTT Data – with projects in places as diverse as Argentina and Azerbaijan, Denmark and Dubai, Mexico and Japan.

I’ve seen first-hand how the best companies are not just adapting, but reconceptualising what business can be. They are guided not by legacy or orthodoxy, but by bold, creative minds who dare to think differently.

Today’s breakthroughs in business thinking are not about tools or frameworks; they are about philosophy and possibility. They question our deepest assumptions about what it means to work, lead, and thrive. They ask how organisations can be more human, more adaptive, more purposeful — and ultimately more effective.

Meta-shifts in business thinking

The meta-shift in business thinking is the transition from control to creativity, from efficiency to evolution, and from hierarchy to ecosystem:

  • From control to creativity: Leadership moves from commanding people to mobilising imagination and collective intelligence.

  • From efficiency to evolution: Organisations focus less on optimising for today and more on adapting, learning, and reinventing continuously.

  • From hierarchy to ecosystem: Value is co-created across networks, partners, and communities, not dictated from the top down.

In essence, business is shifting from being a machine to being a living system … adaptive, regenerative, and purpose-driven.

In this new logic, the best leaders no longer manage resources; they mobilise imagination. Strategy is no longer about beating competitors, but orchestrating networks of value. Innovation is not a department, but a continuous conversation with the future. Transformation is less about restructuring and more about regeneration — enabling people, ideas, and organisations to adapt and grow together.

  • Strategy: from planning to sensemaking
    Strategy is no longer a fixed blueprint; it’s the ability to sense, interpret, and act in complex, uncertain environments.

  • Leadership: from control to consciousness
    Leaders move beyond authority and oversight, cultivating awareness, energy, and purpose to guide people and systems.

  • Innovation: from invention to intelligent imagination 
    Innovation transcends products or technology, combining human creativity with data, AI, and insight to create meaningful impact.

  • Transformation: from change project to perpetual reinvention
    Change is no longer episodic; organisations evolve continuously, learning, adapting, and reinventing themselves in real time.

  • Value: From profit to purposeful profitability
    Financial results remain important, but purpose drives decisions, inspires teams, and aligns organisations with broader societal impact.

This shift reflects a deeper recognition: business is not separate from society or the planet — it is an agent of evolution, shaping how we live, work, and thrive.

I remember exploring this with Amy Edmundson a few years ago at the Thinkers50 Global Summit (pictured with me below). She argued it was time for a more radical reimagination of how organisations work, how leaders think, and the impact which they have.  Her book, about the Fearless Organisation, made her the world’s top business thinker, and enabled her to demand $250k for a keynote.  Maybe that demonstrates the value of “ideas”.

The most powerful ideas change minds. They change choices. They change futures.

Breakthrough ideas in action

Here are some more detail on the ideas, some of them new, some of them less so, which I have seen on my travels and work with business leaders in every corner of the globe – shaping the next generation of management thinking:

Leadership … conscious, collective, and regenerative

1. Conscious Leadership

Leaders such as John Mackey (Whole Foods) and Fiona Hill (Conscious Business Institute) advocate a shift from ego-driven to eco-driven leadership — self-aware, empathetic, and systemic. Conscious leaders manage energy, not people; purpose, not profit; progress, not perfection.

2. Collective Intelligence 

The old heroic model of leadership is dead. The future lies in collective intelligence — systems where teams think together, adapt in real time, and self-organise around purpose. Laloux’s teal organisations and McHale’s hive mind both point toward decentralised, evolutionary leadership.

3. Regenerative Leadership

Beyond sustainability lies regeneration — designing organisations as living systems that restore and renew. And ultimately create “net positive” impact. Regenerative leaders ask: how can our business make life thrive? This thinking is influencing Unilever, Interface, and Danone.

4. Energy Leadership

A new frontier is emotional climate design — how leaders create psychological and energetic resonance across hybrid organisations. The next differentiator in leadership is not IQ or EQ, but AQ — adaptive and affective intelligence.

5.  Minimalist Leadership

Leaders as sense-makers, not saviours. Minimalist leadership focuses on clarity, curiosity, and humility. Berger calls it “simple habits for complex times” — letting go of control and creating space for collective sense-making.

Strategy … from planning to sensemaking

1. Sensemaking 

Strategy now begins with sensemaking — decoding ambiguity before deciding. In complex systems, there are no best practices — only next practices. Leaders must continuously interpret weak signals and reframe assumptions.

2. Optionality

The future is a portfolio, not a prediction. Strategic optionality — building small, low-cost bets in emerging spaces — replaces the old monolithic plan. Think Amazon’s “Day 1” mindset or Netflix’s perpetual beta culture.

3. Ecosystem Strategy and Platform Dynamics

Competitive advantage has moved from ownership to orchestration. Ecosystem strategy designs interconnected systems of value creation — blending collaboration, co-creation, and competition (“coopetition”).

4. Strategic Narrative

In uncertain times, strategy must be told as well as planned. A strategic narrative connects purpose, possibility, and performance — shaping belief and coherence. Great leaders now see storytelling as a core strategic tool.

5. Antifragility and Strategic Resilience

Beyond resilience lies antifragility — systems that strengthen under stress. The best strategies now embrace volatility as fuel for innovation, using scenario stress-testing, real options, and modular organisation design.

6. Using AI to Redefine Economic Systems

AI is still largely embraced by companies as a tool for efficiency. This just reduces the cost of the old paradigms. The real opportunity is to reinvent how businesses work, how markets work, how economies work – a coordination challenge of people, resources and decisions.

Innovation … intelligence, imagination, and impact

1. AI-Augmented Innovation

AI is becoming a creative partner — from design generation to predictive insight. The most advanced companies (like Nestlé, Microsoft, and NTT Data) are now building hybrid human–machine innovation loops — where data augments imagination.

2. Proximity Innovation

Technology is dissolving distance — enabling “just-in-time everything.” Proximity means hyper-local, personalised, instantly fulfilled solutions. It’s the fusion of automation, local fabrication, and digital intimacy.

3. Ecosystem Innovation

Beyond open innovation, we see open orchestration: building adaptive systems of partners who innovate together at speed. Think of Apple’s ecosystem, Alibaba’s platform economy, or IKEA’s circular collaboration networks.

4. Minimal Viable Transformation 

Evolving from MVP (minimum viable product), MVT focuses on rapid, modular transformation. Instead of massive programmes, organisations now build small-scale pilots that create cultural and systemic change at pace.

5. Polarity Thinking & Paradox Innovation

Instead of solving trade-offs, innovators embrace paradox. Profit and purpose, exploration and execution, humans and machines — the most innovative leaders are ambidextrous thinkers who integrate apparent opposites into creative tension.

6. Fractal Innovation Systems

Inspired by nature and network theory, fractal organisations innovate at every level — small units that mirror the whole. Haier’s “microenterprise” model and 37signals’ “shape-up” approach exemplify this — innovation through self-similarity and autonomy.

Transformation … from change management to perpetual reinvention

1. Continuous Reinvention

Transformation is no longer an event — it’s a capability. The new currency of competitiveness is the ability to reinvent faster and smarter than others. Organisations must institutionalise curiosity, learning, and courage.

2. The Transformation Flywheel

Transformation builds momentum through iterative cycles — small wins compound into cultural and strategic acceleration. Microsoft’s cultural reinvention around growth mindset shows how learning drives exponential renewal.

3. Organisational Biomimicry

Businesses are evolving into living systems — decentralised, adaptive, and self-healing. Borrowing from nature, they grow like mycelium networks: distributed, responsive, and regenerative.

4. Psychological Adaptability

Transformation depends not on systems but on mindsets. The Growth Mindset, and more. Organisations that normalise learning, role-shifting, and experimentation turn uncertainty into advantage.

5. Digital–Human Integration

The frontier is not digital transformation, but digital-human fusion — combining algorithmic precision with human creativity. The next advantage lies in designing organisations where machines think and humans imagine.

6. Institutional Courage

Transformational cultures cultivate bravery at scale — where truth can be spoken to power, and curiosity replaces conformity. “Spaciousness” — creating room for new thinking — underpins transformation readiness.

Thinkers’ thinkers

Every two years, Thinkers50 profile the best new ideas, and the best thinkers, around the business world. Here are some of their picks for the important, and provocative, ideas that are likely to shape the C-suites and organisations of the coming years:

Net Positive: How Courageous Companies Thrive by Giving More Than They Take … Andrew Winston & Paul Polman

Former Unilever CEO Polman and coauthor Winston are perhaps the world’s leading thinkers right now, and while their book is a few years old, it has never mattered more. They redefine corporate purpose around net positive impact. They argue that companies must create value for all — people, planet, and profit alike. Using Unilever’s transformation as proof, they show how doing good drives growth. It’s both a moral and strategic manifesto for regenerative capitalism. Their message: the future belongs to those who give back more than they extract.

Reshuffle: Who Wins When AI Restacks the Knowledge Economy … Sangeet Paul Choudary

Choudary argues that AI isn’t just automating work — it’s reorganising economic coordination. The new winners will be those who control data flows, system architectures, and network logic. He reframes firms as nodes in intelligent ecosystems rather than static entities. The “reshuffle” is about how value creation and capture shift in an AI-driven economy. It’s a playbook for navigating the deep restructuring of capitalism itself.

Regeneration: Ending the Climate Crisis in One Generation & Carbon: The Book of Life ... Paul Hawken

Hawken reframes climate action as regeneration — restoring the systems that sustain life. He presents a positive, actionable framework for reversing global warming at speed and scale. In Carbon, he deepens the science, showing carbon as the element of connection, not pollution. His approach links ecology, economy, and equity into one regenerative paradigm. Together, the books are a hopeful blueprint for planetary renewal and human prosperity.

Artificial Integrity: The Paths to Leading AI Toward a Human-Centered Future … Hamilton Mann

Mann argues that AI’s greatest risk isn’t malfunction — it’s moral misalignment. He outlines pathways to ensure integrity, transparency, and accountability in AI systems. Leaders, he says, must embed ethics into every layer of design and deployment. The goal is not just trustworthy AI, but trustworthy institutions behind it. It’s a blueprint for aligning technology with human purpose and shared progress.

The Vested Business Model: Win-Win Partnerships … Kate Vitasek

Kate Vitasek’s Vested model is a quiet revolution in how companies collaborate. Her research at the University of Tennessee shows that the most successful partnerships — from Microsoft to McDonald’s — are not built on contracts that divide risk, but on shared value creation.

The Vested approach reframes outsourcing and alliances as co-ventures — where both sides win by aligning incentives, innovating together, and focusing on long-term outcomes. In an age of complexity, Vitasek’s model offers a pragmatic blueprint for trust-based ecosystems that scale impact, not bureaucracy.

Pioneers: 8 Principles of Business Longevity from Immigrant Entrepreneurs … Neri Karra Sillaman

Immigrant entrepreneurs embody resilience, reinvention, and cross-cultural agility. Karra Sillaman distils lessons from global founders who build lasting enterprises amid uncertainty. Longevity, she argues, stems from adaptability — the ability to navigate borders, markets, and identities. Her eight principles focus on vision, relationships, and the creative tension between belonging and difference. The result is a manifesto for entrepreneurial endurance in a restless, globalised world.

The Canary Code: A Guide to Neurodiversity, Dignity, and Intersectional Belonging at Work … Ludmila Praslova

Praslova reframes neurodiversity as a strategic advantage, not a deficit. Like canaries in a coal mine, neurodivergent people signal systemic workplace problems early. The book maps out how inclusive design and psychological safety unlock innovation and empathy. It calls for moving beyond tokenism to genuine structural inclusion. Her vision: workplaces that thrive through difference, dignity, and deep belonging.

How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage … Ranjay Gulati

Gulati explores how courage fuels leadership, creativity, and change. Boldness, he shows, isn’t recklessness but a cultivated muscle built through purpose and practice. Drawing on psychology and real-world leaders, he reveals how small acts of bravery create momentum. He challenges organisations to design cultures that reward intelligent risk-taking. It’s a science-backed call to replace fear of failure with curiosity and conviction.

The Science of Leadership: Nine Ways to Expand Your Impact … Margaret Moore & Jeffrey Hull

Moore and Hull fuse neuroscience, systems thinking, and coaching psychology. They identify nine evidence-based capacities that define modern leadership. From emotional agility to cognitive range, they show how to expand personal impact. The focus is on inner mastery as the foundation for outer influence. It’s a practical, research-grounded guide to thriving as a 21st-century leader.

Move Fast & Fix Things: The Trusted Leader’s Guide to Solving Hard Problems … Francis Frei and Anne Morris

Frei reclaims the startup mantra “move fast” (as Google said, “and break things”) but now for leaders with integrity. She argues that speed and trust are not opposites — they amplify each other. Through case studies, she shows how clarity, alignment, and accountability drive progress. The method: diagnose deeply, decide boldly, deliver transparently. It’s a leadership guide for decisive action without moral compromise.

The 4-Day Week: Productivity Reimagined … Andrew Barnes

Andrew Barnes, the New Zealand entrepreneur behind the global 4-Day Week movement, has sparked a quiet revolution in how we understand productivity. His central insight is elegantly radical: when people work less, they perform better. By redesigning the working week around outcomes, not hours, Barnes found that employees were more engaged, creative, and loyal.

It’s not about squeezing five days into four; it’s about working smarter. The model has now been tested in thousands of companies across 60 countries, and the results are clear — higher productivity, lower burnout, and better wellbeing. In a world obsessed with hustle, Barnes reminds us that focus, rest, and trust are the true engines of performance.

Don’t Be Yourself: The Case Against Authenticity … Dr Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic

Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic is a psychologist who delights in challenging business orthodoxy. His book Don’t Be Yourselfargues that the cult of authenticity has gone too far. Leaders who “just be themselves” risk mistaking comfort for growth, or self-expression for effectiveness.

Instead, Chamorro-Premuzic calls for intelligent self-management — knowing when to adapt, when to stretch, when to fake confidence until you’ve earned it. Leadership, he argues, is not about being rawly authentic but about being responsibly intentional. In a world that celebrates transparency, he offers a timely counterpoint: we don’t need more authenticity; we need more maturity.

The Caring Company … Isaac Getz and Laurent Marbacher

Isaac Getz and Laurent Marbacher’s The Caring Company is perhaps the most human business book of our time. Their vision is of organisations built on trust, empathy, and freedom — where people are not “resources” to be managed but individuals to be supported.

They argue that capitalism itself is evolving — from an extractive system to a caring economy. Companies like Michelin and Decathlon are already proving that when you give people purpose and autonomy, extraordinary things happen. Their message resonates deeply in a post-pandemic world hungry for meaning: the best businesses care — about people, community, and planet — and profit follows.

Proximity: The Next Frontier of Innovation … Kaihan Krippendorff and Robert Wolcott

Kaihan Krippendorff and Robert Wolcott’s Proximity explores one of the most transformative shifts in modern business: the end of distance. As technology brings production, service, and personalisation ever closer to the customer, we are entering an era of just-in-time everything.

From 3D-printed shoes to hyper-local manufacturing and digital twin ecosystems, proximity redefines the economics of scale and scope. It is not just an operational model; it’s a mindset — one that rewards responsiveness, intimacy, and innovation. For leaders, the challenge is to design systems that are close enough to matter, yet flexible enough to scale.

Minimalist Leadership … Frank Martela

In a world addicted to busyness, Frank Martela’s concept of Minimalist Leadership feels almost spiritual. Drawing on his background in philosophy and psychology, Martela argues that the essence of leadership is not in doing more, but in doing less — better.

Minimalist leaders strip away the noise. They focus on what truly matters: meaning, relationships, clarity. They create space for others to shine. This is not about laziness or detachment, but about deliberate simplicity — a discipline that frees leaders from ego and helps organisations focus their energy on what really counts.

The Hive Mind at Work … Siobhán McHale

Culture expert Siobhán McHale reframes the organisation as a living, thinking organism. In The Hive Mind at Work, she explores how collective intelligence — the shared, dynamic capacity of groups to think and act together — can unlock extraordinary performance.

Her metaphor of the hive is powerful: when teams align around shared purpose and mutual respect, they self-organise with agility and creativity. It’s not about command and control, but about collective flow. The future of work, McHale argues, is not individual brilliance but cooperative genius.

Spaciousness: Creating Time to Think … Megan Reitz and John Higgins

Reitz and Higgins invite leaders to rediscover the lost art of spaciousness. In a world of endless meetings and micro-decisions, they remind us that thinking — deep, reflective, imaginative thinking — is the ultimate competitive advantage.

Their concept of “spacious leadership” is about creating the mental, emotional, and organisational room for insight to emerge. It’s the pause that makes progress possible. The leaders who succeed in turbulent times are those who can step back, breathe, and see the whole system — not just the next task.

Connecting the dots

What unites all these thinkers is a shift from control to connection, from ego to ecosystem, from efficiency to meaning. The next era of management will be defined not by mechanistic structures but by human systems thinking — organisations designed for curiosity, collaboration, and care.

Across the companies I’ve worked with — from the boardrooms of Zurich to the creative labs of Seoul — I see the same hunger: to make business not just faster or leaner, but better. To combine performance with purpose, scale with soul. To rediscover that the greatest breakthroughs in business are not technological — they are conceptual.

We stand on the brink of a new management renaissance. One defined not by rigid hierarchies or old-school playbooks, but by breakthrough ideas that reimagine what’s possible. The question is no longer how to manage work, but how to inspire progress.

And as these thinkers remind us — the future of business will not be built by those who play it safe, but by those who dare to think again.

More from Peter Fisk

Change accelerates. Technology disrupts. Expectations rise. Futures emerge. The only certainty is uncertainty. To survive, let alone thrive, organisations, leaders, and entire societies must shift from reactive resilience to proactive readiness. That shift is at the heart of what is increasingly known as being “future ready”.

 It is not simply about contingency planning or crisis management; it is about cultivating the foresight, agility, and creative courage to shape your own trajectory amidst flux.

In my new research Megatrends 2035, I explore six overarching forces — technological acceleration, social transformation, decarbonisation and resource limits, shifting global power centres, urban–ecosystem evolution, and the rise of humanity as a conscious actor — that will fundamentally reshape markets, ecosystems, and societal expectations. These forces are interconnected, often compounding, and rarely linear. They demand a type of strategic imagination that goes beyond scenario mapping to a deep understanding of emergent possibilities and the interplay between technology, society, and human purpose.

From these patterns, my forthcoming book The Reinvention Playbook introduces a set of strategies and disciplines that help leaders translate insight into action. These range from narrative architecture, which enables organisations to frame compelling futures, to platform thinking, which orchestrates ecosystems of partners, to capability regeneration, which ensures skills, structures, and mindsets remain perpetually relevant. The goal is to embed adaptability, foresight, and a regenerative orientation into the organisation’s very DNA, allowing it not only to withstand disruption but to flourish through it.

Being “future ready” is not about merely coping; it is about turning anticipation into strategic reinvention. It is the capacity to sense weak signals before they become crises, to shift orientation before disruption forces a reaction, to experiment forward, and to continuously redesign both systems and organisational identity. Achieving this requires leaders to operate across four interdependent domains:

  • Strategic foresight – the discipline of mapping plausible futures, challenging dominant assumptions, detecting weak signals, and identifying the inflection points where markets, technologies, and societal expectations will pivot. This is the skill of seeing the horizon with both rigor and imagination, recognising patterns that others overlook, and cultivating an early-warning radar for opportunity and risk alike.
  • Dynamic strategy – the ability to fuse purpose-driven clarity with agile, real-time adaptation. Leaders must maintain a north star while simultaneously improvising the path to it, translating foresight into flexible roadmaps, options, and experiments. Strategy becomes less a document and more a living, responsive practice that blends ambition with continuous sensing.
  • Adaptive organisations – the structures and systems that allow for rapid adjustment. This includes modularity, optioned capabilities rather than fixed assets, regenerative supply chains, and organisational architectures designed for movement rather than rigidity. It is the recognition that the most sustainable advantage is adaptability itself, not temporary efficiency or scale.
  • Cultural plasticity – the mindsets, behaviours, and social norms that enable perpetual learning and reinvention. Psychological safety, tolerance for failure, and the ability to reframe problems and “reimagine from within” are essential. Leaders must cultivate curiosity, empathy, and courage throughout the organisation, embedding an ethic of experimentation and reflective growth.

In short, future readiness is not a programme or a framework; it is a way of thinking and being. It demands that leaders move from responding to disruption to orchestrating it, from predicting change to creating it, and from optimising the present to designing the emergent future.

The organisations that succeed will be those that can combine foresight, strategic dexterity, organisational adaptability, and cultural plasticity into an enduring capability to reinvent themselves continuously — long before the next wave arrives.

Here, I explore some of today’s contemporary business thinkers whose work offers complementary lenses on future readiness. Each helps illuminate one dimension of the readiness journey: how to sense, how to act, how to build capacities, and perhaps most importantly, how to reinvent purpose, identity, and systems in the face of constant flux.

My focus is on curating and connecting their best ideas into a more actionable map for what it means to be future ready — not someday in the future, but right now:

Machine, Platform, Crowd

MIT’s Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee are recognised for their rigorous, empirically grounded explorations of how digital technologies — AI, robotics, platforms, data — reshape the economy, work, and society. Their core insight: we are entering an era in which digital technologies increasingly serve not just as tools but as co-creators and agents, fundamentally altering which tasks humans perform, what work means, and how value is captured.

What are their best ideas?

  • Complementarity and augmentation
    Rather than see technology purely as a replacement for human labor, Brynjolfsson & McAfee emphasize designing systems in which humans and machines complement each other. In a future-ready organization, you don’t merely automate; you reweave work around human judgment, curiosity, empathy, and creative synthesis — with AI as a kind of collaborator.

  • Platform thinking, digital twins, feedback loops
    They show how digital platforms and networked infrastructures create new competitive advantage via scale, data feedback, and ecosystem dynamics. Future readiness demands mindset shifts from linear value chains to platform ecosystems, enabling continuous sensing, iteration, and recombination of assets.

  • The “productivity puzzle” and lag effects
    They carefully study why, despite rapid advances in AI and automation, productivity gains have lagged. Their insight: adoption is uneven, often slow, hindered by organizational, cultural, institutional frictions. That reinforces a core tenet of readiness: having the internal absorptive capacity, culture, and leadership agility to translate technology potential into realized performance.

  • Inequality, dislocation, and reskilling
    Brynjolfsson & McAfee highlight how technology can exacerbate wage polarization and job displacement — but also how policies, education, and redesign of systems can help channel the gains widely. Future readiness is not just about “winning” — it’s about regenerative inclusion. Leaders must think in terms of reinvesting digital dividends into human capital, redeployment, and fairness.

Megatrends 2035 emphasises technological acceleration and the shifting economic centre of gravity. Brynjolfsson & McAfee provide the micro-mechanics of that acceleration at work, showing how pattern recognition, algorithms, and scale reshape industries. Their work underscores the urgency of embedding digital literacy, experimentation, and platform fluency as non-negotiable core capabilities in the Reinvention Playbook.

In a future-ready organisation, you must not wait for a fully formed AI strategy to emerge, but begin weaving human–machine experiments now — small pilots, internal platforms, algorithmic augmentation in R&D, finance, logistics — to shift the cultural and organizational DNA before disruption forces radical change. Their work is a practical touchstone: the digital frontier is not optional; it’s the terrain in which future readiness will be won or lost.

Undisrupted

Ian Khan has pivoted from his earlier metaverse obsession to now focus on transformation, leadership, and future readiness. This time with real foresight, rather than following fads. His new book, Undisrupted: Leadership Essentials on Business, Transformation, Profitability, and Future Readiness, introduces a practical orientation to how leaders and organizations can anticipate and respond before disruption hits. Alongside that, Khan is associated with the Future Readiness Score, a diagnostic and action tool to measure organisational adaptability.

What are his best ideas?

  • Seven Pillars of Future Readiness
    In Undisrupted, Khan outlines seven foundational domains (such as strategic foresight, transformational agility, business model elasticity, resource orchestration, culture of continuous learning, resilience, and stakeholder inclusion) that feed into an organization’s readiness spine. Rather than treat transformation as episodic, he sees it as an enduring, integrated practice.

  • Score as compass, not scoreboard
    Khan’s Future Readiness Score enables leaders to scan their organization’s maturity across these pillars, to spot weak zones, and to calibrate investments. But he stresses that the score is not merely evaluative — it becomes a guide for which levers to pull, where to experiment, and what capacity to rebuild.

  • From resilience to opportunism
    Whereas many change programs aim at resilience (bouncing back), Khan pushes toward opportunism (bouncing beyond). In readiness logic, you’re not just inoculating against downside risk; you are structuring to harvest upside optionality. His frameworks encourage leaders to treat uncertainty as a source of strategic optionality — scanning for early signals, preserving slack, maintaining modularity.

  • Leadership discipline in ambiguity
    One of Khan’s strengths is his emphasis on the human side — the psychological, behavioral, and narrative disciplines leaders need in volatile contexts: how to hold paradox, communicate ambiguity, generate hope even amid uncertainty, and mobilize teams without full clarity.

The Reinvention Playbook is, in its essence, a design manual for embedding agility, renewal, and systemic resonance into organizations. Khan’s pillars map well onto my levers: for example, his “business model elasticity” mirrors your push for experimental platforms; his “resource orchestration” aligns with your modularity and ecosystem thinking. The Future Readiness Score can be a companion metric to my own reinvention maturity index — a diagnostic scaffolding to prioritize where in the playbook to begin.

Khan’s focus on treating readiness as a continuous practice (not a one-off project) echoes your insistence that reinvention is not episodic but perpetual. His contribution is especially valuable at the level of translation — giving busy leaders a digestible, scaffolded pathway into future readiness — and thus a practical complement to your strategic and systemic framing.

Imaginable 

Jane McGonigal is a game designer, and thought leader on how imagination, narrative, and funneling collective intelligence can help us prepare for uncertain futures. Her recent book Imaginable: How to See the Future Coming and Be Ready for Anything (2022) underscores how cultivating a “future imagination muscle” is not whimsical but foundational for foresight and resilience.

What are her best ideas?

  • Futures thinking as a training ground
    McGonigal argues that we can — and should — train ourselves to anticipate emergent futures by constructing alternate narratives, running simulations, and “gaming” weak signals. She sees scenario planning not as a boardroom exercise but as a deeply creative, psychological process of expanding what we feel to be possible. In her view, those who can more richly imagine futures are better prepared to pivot when those plausible worlds begin to converge.

  • Collective sensemaking and participatory futures
    A powerful idea in Imaginable is that future readiness is not an elite function but a distributed capacity. By engaging communities, customers, employees, even entire ecosystems in “future games,” organizations can surface hidden insights, latent anxieties, and emergent signals that no executive horizon scanner would catch alone.

  • Emotional anchoring and anticipatory habits
    McGonigal emphasizes that it’s not enough to know “what might happen” — one must rehearse the emotional, cognitive, and social dimensions of those futures. Through structured “pre-mortems,” future diaries, and immersive prototypes, she helps leaders sensitize their imaginations to the felt logic of future worlds — making leaps more credible and less jarring.

  • Optimistic yet rigorous posture
    While many futurists veer toward doom or hype, McGonigal holds to a disciplined optimism: she sees uncertainty as generative, not only threatening. Her creative approach helps rehearse positive futures as incentive scaffolds, rather than as fantasy. That aligns well with the idea of readiness not as defense but as expansive agency.

Megatrends 2035 map the structural contours of coming disruptions; McGonigal helps leaders inhabit those contours psychologically and emotionally. Her methods can be folded into the Reinvention Playbook as “future immersion routines” — periodic rehearsals, narrative labs, cross-stakeholder futures games, weak signal sprints — that keep your organisation attuned to shifts and open to pivot.

In practice, embedding her mindset means scheduling time and space for unbounded exploration — not as a side hobby, but as a formalized discipline (e.g. quarterly “future jams”) — so that when inflection points accelerate, your leadership team is already fluent in multiple futures. In this sense, McGonigal helps you humanize the foresight dimension of readiness.

Seeing Around Corners

Rita McGrath is a leading thinker in strategy, known particularly for her concept of discovery-driven planning and her work on transient advantage. When I sat down with her on stage at the European Business Forum, she talked about the need to challenge and shake-up our linear mindsets. She has a focus on unlearning strategic complacency, spotting weak signals, and building optionality into strategic portfolios.

What are his best ideas?

  • Transient advantage vs sustainable advantage
    McGrath argues that the era of durable, long-lasting competitive advantage is fading. Instead, organizations must become experts in harvesting advantages, letting them expire, and then pivoting to new growth spaces. Future readiness means treating your core not as sacred, but as an evolving portfolio of options.

  • Signal assessment and strategic discovery
    Her “Seeing Around Corners” methodology trains executives to scan beyond their industry boundaries, cluster weak signals, and convert them into plausible inflection narratives. She encourages mapping competitive vulnerabilities and reading discontinuities not as external threats but as opportunity spaces.

  • Small bets and real options
    McGrath emphasizes structuring investments not around massive commitments, but small bets that preserve downside optionality. The idea is to cultivate a bias toward experimentation, staged scaling, and failure-safe pivots — a posture that aligns directly with the DNA of reinvention.

  • Portfolio mindset and resource reallocation
    To stay future ready, McGrath recommends that companies continuously reallocate resources — not just in red vs green projects, but across waves, domains, and horizon spaces. The core must always subsidize the new, and innovation must be in conversation with the core, not operating wholly apart.

The Reinvention Playbook’s emphasis on modular restructuring, experimentation scaffolding, and cross-domain recombination resonates deeply with McGrath’s portfolio logic and optionality approach. Her methods of signal scanning and pivoting are natural complements to foresight disciplines. Indeed, “Seeing Around Corners” could be formalised as a recurring practice, a method for refreshing the radar of disruption and steering the next adaptive move.

In future readiness terms, McGrath reminds us: it’s not about being “safe,” it’s about being nimble, about embracing the inevitability of change and designing your organization to surf waves of obsolescence. The readiness challenge is not to resist disruption, but to ride it — to define where you will lead, and when you will let go.

Future Fit

René Rohrbeck is known for his work on how firms can develop “future fitness” by integrating foresight into strategic management. One of his notable contributions is the Future FITness Model, which aims to assess and strengthen an organization’s readiness to adapt, learn, and innovate in future contexts.

Rohrbeck’s Future FITness framework is built around three interlocking dimensions:

  • Future Orientation — how proactive, open, and forward-looking an organization is in its scanning, signal processing, and scenario practices. This is about mindset, governance, time horizon orientation, and the capacity to reframe core assumptions.

  • Integration Capability — the ability to absorb foresight into decision-making, strategy, innovation, and resource allocation. That means bridging the gap between futures horizons and day-to-day business operations, ensuring that foresight outcomes are actionable.

  • Transformation Readiness — how ready the organization is to evolve, pivot, reorganize, reallocate, and redirect when new futures begin to crystallize. This includes structural flexibility, portfolio governance, and cultural comfort with ambiguity.

Rohrbeck emphasizes that fitness is not a point-in-time achievement but a continual state of renewal: you strengthen your future intelligence, integration muscle, and transformation agility over time.

So why does this matter for readiness?

  • Diagnostic clarity
    The model gives leaders a lens to evaluate not just whether they do scenario planning but whether those futures permeate strategy, structures, and investments. Many organizations have foresight units that operate in isolation; Rohrbeck’s model insists the foresight must be integrated and dynamically applicable.

  • Bridging “thinking” and “doing”
    A recurring challenge is that many foresight practices remain conceptual, not acting as catalysts for organizational change. Rohrbeck’s insistence on integration ensures that future intelligence is not decorative, but catalytic.

  • Readiness as continuous renewal
    The FITness metaphor helps leaders see readiness not as a checklist to “complete,” but as a muscle to train. It encourages iterative cycles of scanning, prototyping, integrating, and pivoting.

In the Reinvention Playbook, I prescribe discrete levers and phases for renewal — while Rohrbeck’s Future FITness model helps embed a continuous meta-cycle: how often should scanning regenerate, when should integration happen, how and when should transformation pulses be triggered. His model deepens the architecture by linking foresight, strategy, and reconfiguration as a seamless loop.

Combining your Megatrends 2035 lenses (which map structural forces) with Rohrbeck’s model offers a two-level conversation: while Megatrends articulate the macro context, Future FITness ensures your internal architecture remains plastic and tuned to those shifts. Embedding Rohrbeck’s practices — regular scanning sprints, integration forums, transformation pulses — is a way to operationalize readiness as living discipline, not ad hoc project.

Emerging Tech

Amy Webb is founder of the Future Today Institute, which is really a platform for her annual mega-report, Emerging Tech Trends and her books (The Big Nine, The Signals Are Talking). Her practice synthesizes rigorous trend spotting, horizon scanning, and scenario modeling — making her a go-to voice for executives seeking to navigate the tech frontier.

What’s her approach?

  • Trend triangulation and cross-sector synthesis
    Webb’s signature method is to cluster signals across industries, geographies, and domains (e.g. biotech + AI + climate + policy) to surface conjunctions — emergent phenomena that straddle traditional silos. This approach fits the readiness imperative: you must see pattern interactions, not siloed trends.

  • Time horizons and layering
    In her reports she typically stratifies near-term (1–3 years), midterm (3–7), and long-term (10+), helping executives allocate attention, investment, and risk accordingly. Readiness requires not just scanning but time discipline — when to act fast vs when to hedge.

  • Signal archetypes and “weakest signal hotspots”
    Webb constantly identifies “signal archetypes” — patterns that recur across contexts (e.g. convergence of AI + biotech, novel energy systems, emergent regulation). She helps organizations build “future lenses” to filter noise and elevate emergent energies.

  • Transparency, narrative, and engagement
    Webb publishes her trends not as esoteric projections but as accessible narratives, toolkits, prompting archives, and scenario kits. Her strength is in making foresight actionable and grounded for practitioners, helping them internalize futures thinking rather than relegate it to the margins.

Megatrends 2035 provides a structural backbone of shifts; Webb’s reports help to populate them with signals, subtrends, and scenario vectors. Her forecasts feed into the radar modules, scenario backdrops, and optional strategy layers in The Reinvention Playbook. Embedding her triangulation and time layering methods within foresight routines ensures your readiness horizon is not blind to the rapid tech frontier.

Future Readiness

Howard Yu is Lego professor at IMD Business School and director of its Centre for Future Readiness. He’s also a really nice guy. I remember a boxing match which I created between him and Scott Anthony – 6 rounds of future thinking, strategy driving, hard punching ideas into action. (Despite this!) Howard is best known for developing the Future Readiness Indicator, a rigorous, quantified tool to evaluate how well publicly listed companies are positioned to harness future trends.

What’s his approach?

  • Composite scoring across seven dimensions
    Yu’s indicator integrates metrics such as R&D investment, innovation outcomes, business diversification, growth trajectory, financial resilience, liquidity, and workforce/ESG signals to give a composite readiness score. It is not hypothetical — it benchmarks real firms and tracks change over time.

  • Comparative diagnosis and benchmarking
    The indicator allows firms to see where they stand not only in absolute terms, but relative to industry peers. It highlights which dimensions are lagging (e.g. ESG, innovation, liquidity) and thus where to concentrate effort.

  • From indicator to strategy conversations
    Yu advocates using the metric as a strategic conversation starter — not a static scorecard, but a “what if” lens to explore scenario paths and rebalancing moves. He uses it to identify which business units or geographies to accelerate or rethink.

  • Leaps, not just incremental change
    In his earlier thought leadership (e.g. Leap: How to Thrive in a World Where Everything Can be Copied), Yu encourages firms to seek leap transformations rather than incremental improvement — a theme that resonates powerfully with readiness: sometimes the necessary move is a discontinuous shift, not a tweak.

The Reinvention Playbook is about activating strategic levers to transform; Yu’s Future Readiness Indicator gives you a quantitative dashboard of where your organization is — and where the gaps in your reinvention architecture lie. It can help prioritize which dimensions (eg R&D, diversity, liquidity) merit urgent attention as you build readiness.

His emphasis on leaps (from his earlier book) – moving the identity, architecture, or business model – complements the idea that reinvention often requires non-incremental play. In a world shaped by your Megatrends 2035, his indicator helps anchor the playbook in measurable, accountable moves. The smart play is not to treat readiness as aspiration but to structure it into your performance infrastructure — with metrics, feedback loops, and strategic pulses.

How to be “future ready”

The journey to future readiness is neither linear nor optional. It demands scaffolding your foresight, experimentation, and identity renewal in ways that align with the structural forces of the coming decades. These thinkers profiled here offer distinct but complementary perspectives:

  • Brynjolfsson and McAfee bring the frontier of human–machine reimagination.

  • Khan translates readiness into discrete, actionable levers for transformation.

  • McGonigal equips us with imaginative rigor to sense futures before they emerge.

  • McGrath teaches how to treat advantage as fluid and build portfolios of optionality.

  • Rohrbeck defines a meta architecture for embedding fitness and transformation.

  • Webb amplifies signal triangulation and real-world foresight practices.

  • Yu grounds readiness in quantitative metrics and strategic leaps.

The challenge for today’s leaders — whether in the C-suite, strategy teams, or boardrooms — is not simply to survive disruption, but to harness it to create new value, strengthen resilience, and embed purpose. So what does that mean in practical terms? How can leaders make their organizations truly future ready?

1. Map the future drives shaping your markets

The first step is disciplined foresight. Leaders need to cultivate the ability to detect signals before they become shocks. This goes beyond traditional market research; it is about scanning for weak signals, convergent trends, and cross-sector innovations. Tools like scenario planning, environmental scanning, and trend triangulation are essential. Amy Webb’s work on emerging technologies, Rita McGrath’s “Seeing Around Corners” approach, and René Rohrbeck’s Future FITness model offer practical methodologies to map potential disruptions and opportunities.

Forward-looking companies such as Microsoft under Satya Nadella have institutionalized this discipline. By continuously mapping technology and societal trends, they pivoted from a Windows-centric model to a cloud-first, AI-driven ecosystem, anticipating shifts in enterprise computing before competitors could respond.

2. Build an adaptive architecture

Once leaders have sightlines on the future, the next step is organizational adaptability. Traditional hierarchies and rigid business models often struggle under fast change. Future-ready organizations design flexibility into their operations: modular business units, scalable digital platforms, and cross-functional teams that can reconfigure rapidly. Brynjolfsson & McAfee’s work highlights the importance of pairing humans and machines to amplify innovation and productivity.

Tesla exemplifies adaptive architecture. Its vertically integrated production model, combined with flexible software-driven vehicles and rapid iteration cycles, enables it to respond quickly to market shifts, new energy policies, and emerging technologies in ways legacy automakers cannot match.

3. Embed a culture of experimentation

At the heart of readiness lies culture. A company can have all the foresight and architecture in the world, but if its people are risk-averse or fixed in their thinking, change will stall. Leaders must foster psychological safety, encourage experimentation, and reward curiosity. Jane McGonigal’s work reminds us that imagination and simulation are not luxuries but essential capacities: rehearsing multiple futures equips teams to act decisively when disruption arrives.

Amazon’s “Day 1” philosophy is a powerful example. Its culture celebrates small, iterative experiments, and tolerates failure as a necessary part of learning. Teams are empowered to pilot new services or technologies rapidly, from AWS innovations to delivery models, ensuring that the organization constantly tests the edges of possibility.

4. Strategically prioritize what to reinvent

Not all elements of a business need radical reinvention at once. Future-ready leaders apply deliberate focus, targeting areas where disruption is imminent or value creation is largest. Rita McGrath’s transient advantage framework emphasizes viewing competitive edge as dynamic rather than static — the core must fund exploration, and leaders must be prepared to let go of assets or models that are no longer strategic.

Schneider Electric illustrates this principle. Recognizing that energy and resource management were becoming increasingly digital and decentralized, it transformed its portfolio to focus on smart energy solutions and sustainability services, while divesting from legacy hardware businesses. The outcome: a stronger, future-ready position aligned with global decarbonization trends.

5. Mobilise for Transformation

Future readiness is not a one-off initiative; it requires continuous measurement and accountability. Howard Yu’s Future Readiness Indicator and Ian Khan’s Future Readiness Score provide leaders with actionable metrics to track their organization’s agility, innovation capacity, and transformation progress. These tools allow boards and executives to move beyond gut feeling, identifying gaps, monitoring momentum, and triggering interventions in real time.

DBS Bank in Singapore has leveraged similar approaches. By embedding metrics for digital adoption, customer experience, and innovation outcomes, it ensured that its large-scale digital transformation — from traditional banking to a platform-based ecosystem — remained on track and responsive to emerging trends.

6. Lead with purpose and vision

Finally, future readiness is inseparable from purpose. Leaders must define a vision that transcends short-term profits and galvanizes action across their ecosystem. This is where your Reinvention Playbook aligns perfectly: readiness is not just about survival; it is about creating regenerative value that benefits customers, society, and the environment.

Patagonia demonstrates how purpose drives resilience. By embedding environmental stewardship into every part of the business — from supply chain to brand narrative — it has maintained relevance and trust while navigating industry changes and societal expectations.

7. Act Now, iterate continuously

The final call to action is urgency coupled with iteration. Future readiness is not achieved in a single boardroom session or strategy report; it is built over time through repeated cycles of sensing, acting, learning, and scaling. Leaders who wait for perfect clarity or “final trends” risk being blindsided. The message is clear: start small, experiment broadly, integrate insights, and scale what works.

Are you ready?

Future readiness is not a checklist; it is a mindset, a discipline, and a strategic imperative. It requires foresight, adaptive structures, cultural plasticity, strategic prioritization, and purpose-driven leadership. Across industries, leaders who are embracing these principles — from Microsoft to Tesla, Amazon to Schneider Electric — demonstrate that readiness is a competitive advantage, a form of resilience, and a generator of opportunity.

For boards, executives, and strategists, the practical takeaway is simple yet profound: scan, sense, experiment, integrate, measure, and lead with purpose. The future is not a distant horizon — it is already shaping the choices you make today. The organizations that will thrive are those that treat disruption as a canvas for reinvention, embedding readiness into the very DNA of their business.

Future readiness is not a destination. It is a perpetual practice — the defining competence of leaders in the era of megatrends. Start now. Your business, your people, and your society will thank you.

More from Peter Fisk

To understand OpenAI, you have to start with intent. This is not a company that exists merely to ship software faster than competitors or extract short-term value from a hot technology cycle. Its founding purpose –  to ensure AI advances in ways that benefit humanity –  is not a slogan pinned to the wall, but a living constraint that shapes decisions, priorities and trade-offs.

That sense of mission permeates the organisation. People do not join OpenAI simply to work on AI; they join to work on questions that feel consequential. What should intelligence become? Who should it serve? How quickly should it move, and under what guardrails? These questions are not peripheral. They sit at the centre of everyday conversations, from research choices to product launches.

The result is a workplace that feels less like a conventional technology firm and more like a high-velocity research institution operating inside a global platform business. It is ambitious, demanding and often uncomfortable — but rarely complacent.

A global mindset, not a Californian bubble

OpenAI’s internal reality reflects the global nature of the systems it builds. Walk through its offices or join a virtual meeting and you encounter a mix of languages, disciplines and worldviews. Researchers trained in physics debate designers focused on human behaviour. Engineers with roots in Asia, Europe and Africa exchange ideas with ethicists, policy thinkers and product leaders.

This diversity is not ornamental. It is essential. Building general-purpose intelligence demands perspectives that stretch beyond code and compute. The organisation actively values difference — not as a tick-box exercise, but because the complexity of the challenge requires it.

The working style mirrors this diversity. Collaboration is intense and cross-functional by default. Teams form around problems rather than rigid hierarchies, and roles flex as ideas evolve. Titles matter far less than contribution. What counts is the quality of thinking, the clarity of argument and the willingness to challenge assumptions — including those of leadership.

OpenAI is based in San Francisco, California, with its main offices are in the Mission District, which is where most leadership, research, engineering and product teams are based.

However it operates as a distributed organisation. Employees work from other parts of the United States. There are team members across Europe and other regions Remote and hybrid working is common, especially for research and engineering roles So while San Francisco is the centre of gravity, OpenAI functions as a globally connected organisation, reflecting the worldwide impact of the technologies it builds.

Sam Altman and his team

Sam Altman’s influence on OpenAI is less about charismatic pronouncements and more about how he frames trade-offs. He operates as a systems thinker rather than a traditional CEO — someone preoccupied with second- and third-order effects, long-term consequences, and the uncomfortable edges of progress. His leadership style blends ambition with restraint: pushing the organisation to move faster than almost anyone else in the field, while simultaneously insisting that safety, alignment and governance cannot be treated as afterthoughts.

Altman is known internally for asking deceptively simple questions that cut to the heart of complex debates. What happens if this scales globally? Who is excluded? What risks compound over time? These questions shape not just product decisions, but the cadence at which OpenAI releases capabilities and forms partnerships. He is willing to pause momentum when risks feel unresolved — a discipline that is rare in hyper-competitive technology environments.

Crucially, Altman does not operate alone. OpenAI’s leadership team is deliberately plural. Senior figures across research, engineering, policy, safety, product and partnerships hold real power and are encouraged to disagree openly. This creates a leadership dynamic that is more collegiate than hierarchical, and often intellectually demanding. Decisions are debated rigorously, sometimes painfully, before alignment is reached.

The broader executive team reflects the organisation’s hybrid identity: part research institution, part global platform company, part public-interest steward. Technical leaders bring academic depth and frontier expertise; operational leaders focus on scaling systems responsibly; policy and safety leaders ensure that societal implications are surfaced early rather than retrofitted later.

Together, this leadership group functions less like a command structure and more like a deliberative engine — designed to balance speed with reflection, confidence with doubt, and commercial reality with ethical obligation. It is an imperfect, evolving model, but one that mirrors OpenAI’s central challenge: advancing rapidly without losing sight of why it exists in the first place.

Strategy at OpenAI … vision, horizons and agility

Strategically, OpenAI operates on multiple time horizons at once. There is the long game: the pursuit of increasingly capable, general intelligence aligned with human values. There is the medium term: translating breakthroughs into usable tools that create value for individuals, organisations and society. And there is the short term: deciding what to build next, what to release, and what to delay or abandon.

What distinguishes OpenAI’s strategy is not a fixed roadmap, but a commitment to directional clarity combined with tactical agility. The destination is clear. The route is deliberately adaptive.

Rather than locking itself into multi-year plans, the organisation treats strategy as a living system. Choices are revisited as evidence changes. New capabilities reshape priorities. Risks are reassessed continuously. This allows OpenAI to move at speed without drifting into chaos — a balance many organisations struggle to achieve.

Innovation at OpenAI … ideas, systems and portfolios

Innovation at OpenAI is not housed in a lab at the edge of the organisation; it is the organisation. Experimentation is constant and expected. Ideas are tested early, often in imperfect form, then refined or discarded quickly.

Crucially, innovation is managed as a portfolio, not a single bet. Some work is incremental, improving existing models and products. Other efforts are exploratory, pushing into unknown territory with no guarantee of near-term return. This mix allows OpenAI to learn continuously while still delivering tangible outcomes.

Partnerships play a vital role. OpenAI does not attempt to build everything alone. It collaborates with universities, enterprises, governments and technology partners, recognising that ecosystems scale faster than silos. Internally, knowledge is shared deliberately; breakthroughs are documented and reused, not hoarded.

Scaling, when it happens, is intentional. Experiments are not celebrated simply for novelty, but for their ability to move from insight to impact.

Leadership at OpenAI … catalysts, collaborators and culture

Leadership at OpenAI is notably understated. Authority comes less from position and more from judgment. Leaders are expected to be deeply informed, forward-looking and comfortable with uncertainty. They set direction, but they also listen — and they expect to be challenged.

This creates a culture of constructive tension. People are encouraged to question, debate and disagree, provided they do so thoughtfully and in service of better outcomes. Courage and curiosity are valued more than certainty.

The absence of rigid hierarchy speeds decision-making and empowers teams, but it also demands maturity. Individuals are expected to take responsibility, not wait for instruction. Leadership is distributed — a skill to be practised, not a title to be granted.

Culture at OpenAI … speed, ambiguity and learning

Working at OpenAI is not easy. The pace is intense. The expectations are high. Ambiguity is constant. Decisions are often made with incomplete information and real consequences.

Yet for many, this is precisely the appeal. The work feels meaningful. The problems are hard. The learning curve is steep. There is a sense of participating in something that may shape the future, not just respond to it.

The culture rewards substance over optics, progress over perfection, and long-term impact over short-term applause. That does not suit everyone — and OpenAI does not pretend otherwise.

Performance at OpenAI … trust, impact and long-term value

OpenAI’s approach to performance reflects its broader philosophy. Financial sustainability matters — it enables independence and scale — but it is not the sole measure of success. Value is assessed over the long term, including societal impact, trust, safety and ecosystem health.

Relationships with partners and investors are framed around shared horizons, not transactional wins. The organisation is explicit about trade-offs, risks and constraints, preferring credibility over hype. In an era obsessed with speed and valuation, this long-term lens is both rare and instructive.

What can we learn from OpenAI?

5 things you can take away from Sam Altman and his team …

1. Strategy: Direction without rigidity

Purpose is not decoration; it is a strategic filter. Be clear about the future you are trying to create, make explicit choices about where to play and where not to, and treat strategy as a dynamic system rather than a static plan. Agility works best when anchored in conviction.

2. Innovation: Build a portfolio, not a pipeline

Innovation thrives when experimentation is normal, collaboration is easy and learning is fast. Manage innovation as a portfolio of bets — some safe, some bold — and design pathways to scale what works rather than celebrating ideas that never leave the lab.

3. Leadership: Flatten, look forward, stay curious

The most effective leaders today create clarity without control. They look ahead, invite challenge, and model learning. Authority should come from insight and integrity, not hierarchy. Courage and curiosity matter more than certainty.

4. Culture: Design for truth, not comfort

High-performing cultures allow disagreement, reward substance and tolerate discomfort in service of progress. Psychological safety does not mean avoiding tension; it means handling it well. Culture should enable honest thinking at speed.

5. Performance: Think in decades, not quarters

Sustainable value is built over time. Align investors, partners and teams around long-term outcomes. Measure what matters — trust, capability, resilience — not just what is easy to count. Performance is a system, not a scorecard.

Building the future

OpenAI is not a template to be copied wholesale. Its context is unique, and its challenges extreme. But its underlying principles — purpose with teeth, strategy with flexibility, innovation as a system, leadership without ego and performance measured over time — are profoundly relevant.

In a world of accelerating change, the most important lesson may be this: the future does not belong to the fastest organisations, but to those that can learn, adapt and act with intention — again and again.

In a world of dramatic change –  from AI and robotics, to climate crisis and resource constraints, shifting consumer values and  social expectation –  the business imperative has shifted. Once the goal was efficiency: to do more with less. Then the narrative turned to sustainability and corporate social responsibility (CSR): reduce negative impact, comply with regulation, show you care. More recently, environmental, social and governance (ESG) frameworks have offered a mainstream rubric to investors and boards.

But today a deeper shift is underway: from “less bad” to “more good”.  This is the domain of regenerative business models,  companies that not only minimise harm, or reuse resources, but actively rebuild ecosystems, enrich communities, and embed purpose into the heart of their value creation. Regeneration is not a sideline—it becomes strategy.

Crucially, this shift is not merely moral or philanthropic. It is becoming commercial. Because in a world of increasing volatility, companies that embed resilience, long‑term value, stakeholder alignment and ecosystem thinking are more likely to thrive. Their intangible assets — brand trust, purpose alignment, supply‑chain partnerships, community goodwill — become the strategic differentiators. Regeneration and commercial success are not opposed; in many cases they are intertwined.

In this article we examine how leading European firms are walking this path. We explore their purpose and strategy, leadership and culture, business model and innovation, supply‑chain and ecosystem design, and financial and non‑financial performance. The cases illustrate how regeneration is more than a buzzword — it is a lens for business reinvention.

What do we mean by “regenerative”?

“Regenerative” is a difficult word in the corporate world, and has many interpretations. At one end sits compliance and efficiency; next comes sustainability and then circularity — strategies designed to reduce waste and reuse materials. Regeneration goes beyond: it aims actively to rebuild ecological systems and social capital. That means restoring soil health and biodiversity, rebuilding coastal and marine habitats, reversing carbon accumulation in the atmosphere by sequestering carbon in the ground and vegetation, and reweaving fair and resilient local economies. It’s not simply a product attribute; it is a systemic ambition encoded into corporate purpose, governance, investment, and metrics.

There are three distinctive features of regenerative business models:

  • Give more than take … business models and ecosystems, products and services, are designed so that, across their lifecycle, they return more social and environmental value than they extract.

  • Reinventing the way we work … companies partner with suppliers, communities and public actors to alter production systems (for instance, shifting commodity agriculture to regenerative farming practices).

  • Purpose and profit are equally important … structures and metrics (from ownership to capital allocation) are engineered so that long-term ecological and social outcomes are core to decision-making, not peripheral.

These criteria form the lens through which we explore a new mindset for business success.

Patagonia, of course, has long been held up as a trailblazer in this context. Yvon Chouinard’s business has show the way in conscious capitalism, showing the businesses can be platforms for good, creating a business model that looks beyond money making, and a brand as a community of people fighting for a bigger cause.

But what about some of the other companies around the world?

Europe’s Regenerative Leaders

Europe has become a hotbed of regenerative businesses over recent years, driven by social and political agendas, as well as an awakening among business leaders of a better way. No company, of course, is perfect; but each of the following companies show significant progress on their journey, combining ambition with practical transformation:

Acciona, Spain … regenerative infrastructure

Strategy:
Acciona has positioned itself at the forefront of regenerative infrastructure. Its business model integrates environmental and social value creation into construction, renewable energy, and water projects. The company’s master plan goes beyond reducing harm; it actively restores ecosystems and social capital. Climate mitigation, biodiversity recovery, circular construction, and water stewardship are embedded in each project, with an explicit goal of leaving a net-positive footprint on both natural and human systems.

Leadership:
Leadership at Acciona links executive remuneration and career progression directly to measurable sustainability targets. José Manuel Entrecanales and his team have cultivated a culture in which project managers and engineers consider ecological and social outcomes as integral to decision-making. Sustainability is treated not as compliance, but as a lens through which all operational and strategic choices are evaluated.

Innovation:
The company has pioneered low-carbon concrete, modular construction that allows for disassembly and reuse, and recycling of complex materials such as wind turbine blades. Nature-based solutions — including urban green corridors, pollinator habitats, and rewilded zones — are standard practice in large-scale infrastructure projects.

Ecosystem:
Acciona’s scale allows it to convene suppliers, local authorities, NGOs, and academic institutions in a shared agenda for regeneration. Supplier standards require low-emission materials and ethical sourcing, while urban development projects are designed to integrate biodiversity, local employment, and climate resilience.

Performance:
More than 90% of Acciona’s capital investments now align with the EU sustainable taxonomy. Renewable energy operations continue strong growth, and biodiversity indices show measurable gains across key project sites. Acciona demonstrates that infrastructure can generate ecological and social value alongside financial return.

Arket, Sweden … regenerative fashion

Strategy:
Part of the H&M Group, Arket differentiates itself through durable essentials for men, women, children, and home, combining minimalistic design with circularity. Its 2030 vision aims for fully sustainable sourcing and a circular product life cycle. Unlike conventional fashion brands, Arket measures success not by volume but by product longevity, reuse, and repairability, positioning sustainable consumption as central to its strategy.

Leadership:
Arket benefits from H&M’s global infrastructure but operates with a culture of transparency and accountability. Leadership incentivises teams to prioritise durability and traceability, promoting a mindset where design, materials, and supply chain choices are all scrutinised for environmental and social impact.

Innovation:
Arket’s circular innovations include children’s clothing rental, repair services, and mono-material garments designed for recycling. Regenerative fibres — organic cotton, Tencel, and recycled polyester — are standard, while low-impact dyes and sustainable packaging reduce the brand’s environmental footprint.

Ecosystem:
The brand leverages H&M’s supplier network to implement circularity at scale, working with textile recyclers, start-ups, and technology partners. Customer engagement campaigns educate consumers on care, repair, and reuse, effectively extending the life of products while reinforcing brand loyalty.

Performance:
Despite being relatively young, Arket has enhanced customer retention and brand value through sustainability-led differentiation. Its initiatives prepare the business for a market increasingly attentive to ethical consumption, while generating operational efficiencies from reduced returns and extended product lifespans.

BayWa, Germany … regenerative agriculture

Strategy:
BayWa AG combines agribusiness, renewable energy, and building materials under a regenerative framework. Its strategy focuses on sustainable crop production, carbon-smart farming, and energy efficiency. By integrating these sectors, BayWa decouples growth from environmental degradation while enhancing resource productivity.

Leadership:
CEO Marcus Pöllinger promotes long-term ecological stewardship. Leadership works with farmers and partners to adopt regenerative practices such as cover cropping, reduced tillage, soil restoration, and biodiversity initiatives. Training programmes, financial incentives, and knowledge-sharing mechanisms embed these practices across the ecosystem.

Innovation:
BayWa has developed digital farming platforms that measure soil health, track carbon sequestration, and optimise crop yields. Simultaneously, BayWa r.e. expands solar, wind, and biogas projects that provide energy back to farms and communities, creating integrated synergies between agriculture and renewables.

Ecosystem:
The company’s ecosystem spans farmers, suppliers, energy providers, and research institutions. These stakeholders collaborate to improve soil quality, increase biodiversity, and reduce environmental impact while maintaining productivity.

Performance:
BayWa reports consistent growth in renewable energy and sustainable agriculture. Pilot projects show measurable ecological improvements, demonstrating that traditional agribusiness can be transformed into a commercially viable regenerative enterprise.

Climeworks, Switzerland … regenerative carbon

Strategy:
Climeworks leads in direct air capture technology, removing CO₂ from the atmosphere to counter climate change. Its approach is regenerative at the planetary scale: by permanently storing carbon, the company contributes directly to restoring the balance of the carbon cycle.

Leadership:
Founders Christoph Gebald and Jan Wurzbacher foster a culture of scientific excellence and climate responsibility. Leadership emphasises transparency, verification, and the scaling of technology for systemic impact. The company’s ethos integrates ethical stewardship with commercial pragmatism.

Innovation:
Climeworks’ technology generates revenue through subscriptions, corporate partnerships, and government programmes. The Orca and Mammoth plants in Iceland exemplify industrial-scale carbon capture powered by renewable energy. Research and development focus on improving efficiency, reducing costs, and integrating storage solutions that secure long-term carbon removal.

Ecosystem:
The company collaborates with governments, energy providers, and research institutions, creating a networked ecosystem that multiplies impact. Partnerships with corporations such as Microsoft and Stripe demonstrate how private and public sectors can co-invest in scalable regenerative solutions.

Performance:
Climeworks has operationalised commercial-scale direct air capture and attracted substantial investment, proving the financial and technological viability of a regenerative carbon removal model.

Danone, France … regenerative food

Strategy:
Danone integrates regenerative agriculture across its global supply chain, focusing on soil health, water stewardship, and biodiversity. The goal is to transition from linear commodity sourcing to restorative farming models, ensuring that every litre of milk or plant-based ingredient contributes to ecological renewal.

Leadership:
Executives embed sustainability metrics into corporate strategy and remuneration. Leadership cultivates collaborative relationships with farmers, promoting shared learning, capacity building, and ecosystem stewardship. Strategic decisions are evaluated through a dual lens of financial and regenerative impact.

Innovation:
Danone combines consumer-facing innovation with upstream regenerative practice. Programmes include regenerative dairy, sustainable plant-based sourcing, circular packaging, and soil carbon monitoring. Technology and data allow the company to measure outcomes at scale, aligning commercial and environmental objectives.

Ecosystem:
Farmers, co-operatives, NGOs, and suppliers collaborate to implement regenerative methods. This networked approach creates resilience, enhances biodiversity, and stabilises supply chains. Cross-sector partnerships also advance financial models for soil-carbon crediting and sustainable investment.

Performance:
Danone reports measurable improvements in soil carbon, biodiversity, and sustainable sourcing, all while maintaining market share and product profitability. Its model demonstrates that regenerative agriculture can underpin both ecological restoration and commercial growth.

EcoAlf, Spain … regenerative fashion

Strategy:
EcoAlf transforms ocean plastics and other post-consumer waste into high-quality apparel and accessories. Its strategy is purpose-driven: tackle marine pollution while demonstrating that circular materials can deliver premium consumer products. By embedding regeneration into both supply chain and brand storytelling, EcoAlf converts waste into tangible ecological and economic value.

Leadership:
Founder, my good friend, Javier Goyeneche champions a culture of environmental responsibility and creativity. Leadership prioritises material innovation, transparency, and systemic thinking, motivating teams to pursue solutions that restore natural systems while appealing to conscious consumers.

Innovation:
EcoAlf uses recycled ocean plastics, discarded fishing nets, and textile offcuts to produce clothing and bags. Its innovation extends beyond materials to business models, integrating consumer education, transparent impact reporting, and premium branding that aligns profit with planetary benefit.

Ecosystem:
The company collaborates with local waste collectors, recycling facilities, and NGOs to close the loop. Partnerships extend across design, production, and distribution, creating a network that reinforces circularity and environmental awareness.

Performance:
EcoAlf has achieved global market penetration while retaining its regenerative focus. The company demonstrates that luxury and circularity can coexist, proving that consumer goods can be both profitable and restorative.

Ecosia, Germany … regenerative search

Strategy:
Ecosia merges digital technology with ecological regeneration. Its search engine business model channels advertising revenue into reforestation and ecosystem restoration globally. By aligning user activity with planetary benefit, Ecosia operationalises regeneration at scale in an otherwise digital sector.

Leadership:
Founder Christian Kroll instils a culture of transparency, ecological responsibility, and accountability. Leadership emphasises measurable impact, with quarterly reports on tree planting and project outcomes, fostering trust with users and stakeholders.

Innovation:
The company monetises search engine traffic to fund reforestation. Innovations include integrating geographic data to prioritise planting in biodiversity hotspots, developing local community engagement models, and tracking long-term ecological outcomes.

Ecosystem:
Ecosia works with NGOs, local governments, and community groups, forming a collaborative ecosystem that maximises social and environmental value. This network extends to technology providers, advertisers, and civic partners to scale regeneration globally.

Performance:
Ecosia has planted tens of millions of trees and restored degraded land, demonstrating that a simple digital model can generate measurable regenerative outcomes while sustaining a profitable platform.

First Milk, UK … regenerative dairy

Strategy:
First Milk operates as a farmer-owned co-operative, integrating regenerative agriculture into milk production. Its approach focuses on soil health, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration, while maintaining high-quality dairy outputs.

Leadership:
Leadership promotes long-term collaboration with farmer-members, incentivising regenerative practices through both technical support and financial rewards. The culture encourages stewardship over extraction, emphasising resilience and ecological value creation.

Innovation:
The co-operative combines traditional dairy techniques with soil-restorative interventions, such as rotational grazing, cover crops, and hedgerow restoration. It monitors regenerative outcomes, linking ecological performance to member remuneration.

Ecosystem:
Farmers, co-operatives, distributors, and local communities collaborate to implement regenerative practices across the supply chain. This network creates resilience and ensures alignment between ecological goals and operational realities.

Performance:
The programme has enhanced biodiversity, soil quality, and carbon sequestration while maintaining milk yields and market competitiveness. First Milk demonstrates that regenerative agriculture can underpin both ecological health and commercial stability.

Greiner, Austria … regenerative plastics

Strategy:
Greiner, a leader in plastics and foam, has come along way since I first worked with them 10 years ago. It has embraced regeneration through its “Blue Plan” framework, focusing on reducing emissions, increasing recycled content, and restoring material value. The strategy combines operational transformation with long-term ecological objectives.

Leadership:
Leadership integrates sustainability deeply into corporate culture, promoting generational thinking, science-based targets, and innovation in materials. The management ethos balances commercial ambition with environmental accountability.

Innovation:
Greiner’s innovations include mono-material designs for easier recycling, compostable packaging, and high-recyclate foam solutions. Product development actively substitutes virgin plastics with recycled alternatives without compromising performance.

Ecosystem:
Supplier audits, EcoVadis certification, and closed-loop recycling programmes exemplify ecosystem engagement. Greiner collaborates with partners, customers, and regulatory bodies to extend the regenerative impact of its products.

Performance:
With revenues approaching €2 billion, Greiner demonstrates that industrial-scale operations can align with regenerative principles. Emission reductions, increased recycled content, and product longevity all highlight the practical viability of heavy-industry regeneration.

Holcim, Switzerland … Cement and building materials

Strategy:
Holcim is one of my favourite clients, and I have worked with their leaders across the business. It aims to transform construction into a regenerative sector. Its focus is on low-carbon cement, circular aggregates, and climate-positive construction practices. By redesigning both materials and processes, Holcim seeks to mitigate the traditionally high environmental footprint of building materials.

Leadership:
Miljan Gutevic and his executive teams embed sustainability targets into operations, R&D, and capital allocation. Leadership emphasises systemic thinking, linking material innovation to broader environmental restoration goals. Their investor presentations (see the recent Capital Markets Day 2025) are a great example of putting sustainability and regeneration at the core of their strategy.

Innovation:
Holcim invests in alternative binders, recycled aggregates, and carbon capture technologies. Pilots of carbon-negative concrete and modular construction techniques demonstrate tangible regenerative outcomes in urban development.

Ecosystem:
Collaboration with construction companies, municipalities, architects, and NGOs creates a network that extends regenerative impact across the value chain. By sharing knowledge and materials solutions, Holcim accelerates sector-wide adoption.

Performance:
Holcim has reduced CO₂ emissions per ton of cement and launched the first commercial-scale carbon-negative concrete projects. This demonstrates that heavy construction materials can evolve from extractive to restorative business models, paralleling innovations seen in Interface flooring.

IKEA, Sweden … regenerative retail

Strategy:
IKEA aims to become climate-positive by 2030, embedding circular design, renewable materials, and forest stewardship into every aspect of operations. Its approach combines product innovation with supply chain regeneration to create systemic environmental benefit.

Leadership:
Leadership integrates sustainability into product development, corporate strategy, and capital planning. Teams are incentivised to optimise both environmental impact and customer experience, fostering a culture where regeneration is core to the business model.

Innovation:
IKEA has advanced circular design, enabling product repair, reuse, resale, and recycling. Renewable and recycled materials underpin the offering, while digital platforms facilitate product take-back and lifecycle management.

Ecosystem:
Suppliers, forest managers, recyclers, and logistics partners collaborate to achieve regenerative outcomes. This mirrors Arket’s approach to circularity but at a global scale, demonstrating the intersection of industrial and retail ecosystems in driving systemic change.

Performance:
IKEA has increased the share of sustainable materials, implemented energy-positive factories, and piloted resale and repair initiatives, all while sustaining global growth. The company exemplifies the commercial feasibility of large-scale regenerative retail.

Interface, Netherlands/US … regenerative flooring

Strategy:
Interface’s mission, articulated through its Climate Take Back initiative, is to reverse climate change by creating carbon-negative flooring and restoring natural systems. Unlike incremental sustainability measures, Interface targets net-positive impact, aiming to leave the planet better than it found it.

Leadership:
Leadership fosters mission-driven innovation and transparency. Executives embed environmental responsibility into every level of decision-making, from R&D to sales, cultivating a culture where long-term ecological and financial objectives coexist.

Innovation:
Interface produces modular flooring using recycled materials, bio-based alternatives, and closed-loop designs. Programmes like Net-Works convert discarded fishing nets into carpet tiles, simultaneously reducing ocean plastic pollution and supporting coastal communities. Innovative manufacturing methods reduce carbon intensity and water usage, creating a replicable model for regenerative industrial production.

Ecosystem:
Suppliers, recyclers, NGOs, and communities collaborate to extend impact across the supply chain. Partnerships combine ecological restoration, social benefits, and commercial viability, creating a systemic regenerative ecosystem that stretches beyond the company itself.

Performance:
Interface has reduced greenhouse gas emissions per square metre of flooring while expanding revenue from sustainable products. The company demonstrates that restorative industrial practices can scale, supporting both ecological regeneration and brand leadership.

Klima, Germany … regenerative living

Strategy:
Klima offers a digital platform that enables individuals and organisations to measure, reduce, and offset their carbon footprint. Its regenerative approach encompasses ecosystem restoration, carbon neutrality, and behaviour change, translating climate responsibility into tangible outcomes.

Leadership:
Leadership emphasises transparency, accountability, and measurable environmental impact. Teams are encouraged to integrate climate science into product design and user engagement, cultivating a culture of climate-conscious innovation.

Innovation:
Klima funds tree planting, ecosystem rehabilitation, and carbon offset projects through subscription services and corporate partnerships. Innovative algorithms track user emissions and measure reductions, linking behaviour change to actionable regenerative outcomes.

Ecosystem:
The company collaborates with reforestation NGOs, project developers, and local communities, creating a networked model of environmental restoration. Corporate clients and individual users amplify the regenerative effect, while technological integration ensures data-driven impact monitoring.

Performance:
Klima has facilitated measurable reductions in CO₂ emissions and supported ecosystem restoration projects across multiple continents. Its tech-enabled regenerative model demonstrates that digital platforms can play a vital role in systemic environmental impact.

Lush, UK … regenerative cosmetics

Strategy:
Lush integrates regenerative sourcing, ethical supply chains, and community engagement into its cosmetics business. Ingredients are chosen not only for quality but for their ability to restore and maintain ecological systems.

Leadership:
Leadership champions mission-driven culture, embedding social and environmental goals into product development, marketing, and operations. Lush demonstrates how corporate governance can directly reinforce regenerative outcomes.

Innovation:
Lush’s products use natural, ethically sourced ingredients. Programmes include packaging-free “naked” products, refill initiatives, and regenerative farming partnerships. Research and sourcing teams work to continually improve both environmental and social impacts.

Ecosystem:
Supplier networks are carefully managed to promote fair trade, biodiversity, and local community development. Collaborations with NGOs and farmers strengthen regenerative practices while creating resilient, traceable supply chains.

Performance:
Lush maintains strong financial performance alongside measurable social and environmental impact. Its approach illustrates that regenerative principles can be central to brand differentiation, loyalty, and profitability in consumer goods.

PulPac, Sweden … regenerative packaging

Strategy:
PulPac develops fibre-based alternatives to single-use plastics, aiming to regenerate natural systems by substituting renewable, recyclable materials for traditional plastics. The company positions itself at the intersection of material innovation and systemic environmental restoration.

Leadership:
Leadership integrates sustainability into R&D and business growth strategies. Corporate culture encourages material innovation that scales globally while reducing carbon intensity and environmental burden.

Innovation:
PulPac’s proprietary technology produces high-performance fibre packaging suitable for food, pharmaceuticals, and consumer goods. Innovations include high-speed manufacturing processes and compatibility with recycling infrastructure, ensuring low environmental impact at scale.

Ecosystem:
The company works closely with consumer goods brands, material suppliers, and recyclers to expand regenerative impact. Partnerships ensure that fibre substitution translates into measurable ecological benefits, closing the loop on single-use plastic reduction.

Performance:
PulPac has scaled operations internationally, demonstrating that fibre-based, low-carbon packaging solutions are commercially viable. Environmental impact metrics highlight reductions in plastic waste and carbon emissions, reinforcing the regenerative potential of industrial innovation.

Triodos Bank, Netherlands … regenerative finance

Strategy:
Triodos specialises in financing enterprises that deliver social, cultural, and environmental benefits. The bank’s regenerative approach integrates ethical principles into investment decisions, creating systemic positive outcomes across multiple sectors.

Leadership:
Leadership fosters a culture of transparency, ethical responsibility, and long-term thinking. Corporate governance aligns lending and investment policies with measurable regenerative outcomes, demonstrating that finance can be a driver of ecological and social restoration.

Innovation:
Triodos designs lending and investment products that prioritise renewable energy, regenerative agriculture, and social enterprises. Innovative financial instruments link returns to environmental and social impact, allowing capital to flow to projects that generate measurable regeneration.

Ecosystem:
Partnerships with NGOs, renewable energy developers, and social enterprises amplify systemic impact. Triodos’ approach demonstrates the catalytic effect of finance in scaling regenerative solutions across geographies and sectors.

Performance:
The bank has delivered stable financial returns while ensuring positive ecological and social outcomes. Its model proves that banking can be transformed into a regenerative enterprise that supports both profit and planetary well-being.

Veja, France … regenerative footwear

Strategy:
Veja integrates regenerative cotton farming and Amazonian wild-rubber sourcing into its footwear production. Its approach is systemic, targeting soil health, community empowerment, and ecosystem restoration within the supply chain. By embedding regenerative principles into raw material sourcing, Veja demonstrates that fashion can be both profitable and restorative.

Leadership:
Leadership emphasises transparency, environmental integrity, and social impact. Founders Sébastien Kopp and François-Ghislain Morillion cultivate a mission-driven culture, encouraging ethical decision-making across design, sourcing, and marketing.

Innovation:
Veja’s innovations combine sustainable materials, ethical production, and durable design. The company also develops traceable supply chains using digital tools, ensuring that each product reflects measurable regenerative impact.

Ecosystem:
Veja collaborates closely with cooperatives, smallholder farmers, and NGOs to implement regenerative practices. Partnerships support biodiversity, fair income, and local community development, creating a resilient and scalable regenerative ecosystem.

Performance:
Veja has achieved global recognition for sustainability, product quality, and profitability. Its model illustrates that regenerative sourcing can drive brand differentiation and commercial success simultaneously.

Vestre, Norway … regenerative furniture

Strategy:
Vestre designs and manufactures public furniture with a regenerative lens, prioritising biodiversity, low-carbon production, and social value creation. Its approach extends beyond product to factory and urban environment, aiming to leave a net-positive ecological footprint.

Leadership:
Leadership embeds long-term environmental and social objectives into strategic planning. CEO Olav Kristensen promotes a culture where design thinking, industrial manufacturing, and sustainability are inseparable, creating alignment between purpose and execution.

Innovation:
Vestre innovates with low-emission steel production, circular material usage, and design that encourages community engagement and ecological restoration. Its flagship factory, The Plus, embodies regenerative principles in architecture, energy, and workflow.

Ecosystem:
Suppliers, designers, urban planners, and municipalities collaborate to maximise social and environmental impact. Projects integrate ecosystem thinking at city scale, demonstrating how industrial design can influence urban regeneration.

Performance:
Vestre has secured international contracts while achieving significant reductions in carbon footprint and environmental impact. Its regenerative approach strengthens brand value, employee engagement, and global competitiveness, illustrating the viability of purpose-led industrial design.

Wildfarmed, UK/Belgium … regenerative food ingredients

Strategy:
Wildfarmed connects major food brands with regenerative farms, focusing on soil health, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. Its purpose is to transform conventional agricultural supply chains into networks of ecological and social renewal.

Leadership:
Leadership prioritises systemic change, farmer engagement, and regenerative agriculture education. Founders cultivate a culture that balances commercial viability with environmental responsibility, ensuring that each product sourced contributes positively to the ecosystem.

Innovation:
Wildfarmed acts as a bridge between regenerative farms and industrial-scale manufacturers. Innovations include traceability platforms, impact measurement tools, and sourcing models that reward ecological stewardship, enabling regenerative practices to scale commercially.

Ecosystem:
The company’s ecosystem spans farmers, brands, and supply chain partners. By integrating regenerative criteria into purchasing decisions, Wildfarmed creates incentives for widespread adoption of soil-restorative practices, enhancing biodiversity and carbon capture across landscapes.

Performance:
Despite its smaller scale, Wildfarmed has enabled measurable ecological improvements while maintaining commercial viability for partners. Its model demonstrates that supply chain innovation can operationalise regeneration in global food systems.

Common Themes in Regeneration

Across Europe, leading regenerative companies reveal a coherent set of principles and practices that distinguish them from conventional sustainability initiatives. What unites these businesses is not just a commitment to reduce harm, but a deliberate strategy to create net-positive social, environmental, and economic impact.

From carbon-capturing technologies to circular fashion, regenerative enterprises demonstrate that business can restore ecosystems, strengthen communities, and redefine value creation. Several interlinked themes emerge as critical to their success.

Regenerative Strategy

At the heart of every regenerative company is a purpose-driven strategy that transcends traditional corporate responsibility. This strategy is proactive, systemic, and measurable: it aims not only to mitigate negative impact but to generate positive ecological and social outcomes. Companies like Climeworks target atmospheric carbon removal at scale, EcoAlf transforms marine waste into high-value apparel, and ACCIONA designs infrastructure projects that enhance biodiversity, water quality, and climate resilience.

Regenerative strategies are often codified into specific, quantifiable objectives—carbon neutrality targets, soil health metrics, circular material utilization rates, biodiversity enhancements, or water conservation goals. These metrics inform investment decisions, product development, and operational priorities, creating a clear line of sight between corporate purpose and measurable outcomes. Importantly, these strategies align with wider systemic agendas, such as the EU sustainability taxonomy, ensuring that regenerative ambition is compatible with regulatory frameworks and market incentives.

In effect, regenerative strategy reframes business from a transactional, extractive activity into a restorative system, where every decision—from sourcing to end-of-life design—contributes to environmental and social health.

Regenerative Leadership

Leadership is the engine of regenerative transformation. In these companies, executives do more than set high-level vision; they embed regenerative thinking into culture, governance, and performance systems. Senior leaders link remuneration, career progression, and investment priorities directly to ecological and social outcomes, signalling that regeneration is central to business success.

This leadership ethos cultivates a culture of long-term thinking, resilience, and adaptability. Employees are empowered to participate in sustainability initiatives, suggest innovations, and engage with communities. At Greiner, cross-departmental collaboration drives closed-loop plastics solutions, while at Vestre and Veja, leadership ensures that regenerative principles permeate daily operational decisions—from sourcing and design to logistics and retail.

Crucially, regenerative leadership extends beyond internal culture: it shapes external partnerships, drives advocacy, and aligns corporate strategy with systemic environmental and societal goals. It positions companies as both market leaders and ecosystem stewards, capable of influencing peers, suppliers, and regulators.

Regenerative Innovation

Innovation in regenerative companies is multidimensional, extending far beyond technology to business models, service design, and system-wide processes. Companies demonstrate that regenerative principles can be commercially viable, generating new revenue streams while restoring natural and social systems.

For example:

  • Arket experiments with rental and resale models for clothing, extending product lifespans and reducing resource demand.

  • Climeworks operates subscription-based carbon capture services, monetizing ecological restoration at scale.

  • PulPac produces fibre-based packaging as a high-performance alternative to single-use plastics, creating circular material flows in industries traditionally dependent on virgin resources.

  • Wildfarmed bridges regenerative farmers with industrial-scale food manufacturers, incentivizing soil restoration and biodiversity while maintaining commercial viability.

Such innovation challenges the linear “take-make-dispose” paradigm, fostering circularity, net-positive outcomes, and system-wide resilience. The regenerative mindset encourages companies to design offerings, processes, and collaborations that generate both ecological benefit and business advantage, proving that restoration and profitability are mutually reinforcing.

Regenerative Ecosystems

No company operates in isolation; regeneration is inherently collaborative and networked. Leading businesses actively engage suppliers, communities, NGOs, governments, and even competitors to achieve systemic impact.

Notable examples include:

  • Interface’s Net-Works programme, which collects discarded fishing nets to manufacture carpet tiles, simultaneously restoring marine ecosystems and supporting livelihoods for coastal communities.

  • Ecosia, which directs search-engine revenue into tree-planting initiatives managed in partnership with local NGOs.

  • Danone, collaborating with farmers and cooperatives across Europe to embed regenerative practices into dairy and plant-based supply chains.

In these cases, the supply chain functions not just as a cost center, but as a driver and amplifier of regenerative impact. Companies cultivate ecosystems where stakeholders share knowledge, align incentives, and jointly measure outcomes, demonstrating that regeneration is as much about relationships as it is about technology or products.

Regenerative Performance

A defining feature of regenerative enterprises is the mutual reinforcement of financial and environmental performance. Far from being a burden, regenerative initiatives enhance brand reputation, foster customer loyalty, engage employees, and strengthen operational resilience.

Financially, companies report growth in revenue from sustainable products, operational efficiencies, and risk mitigation. For example:

  • IKEA’s repair and resale programmes extend product life and reduce raw material costs.

  • Climeworks’ subscription revenue model scales alongside measurable carbon removal.

  • EcoAlf has built a profitable global fashion brand based on recycled materials.

Non-financial performance is equally critical and measurable:

  • Greenhouse gas reductions (Holcim, Interface)

  • Soil regeneration and carbon sequestration (Danone, Wildfarmed, First Milk)

  • Biodiversity enhancement (Acciona, Vestre, Veja)

  • Water conservation (BayWa, Acciona)

  • Social impact metrics including fair labor practices, community development, and employee well-being (Lush, Triodos Bank)

By quantifying both ecological and social outcomes, these companies demonstrate that regeneration is not a soft aspiration but a strategic, measurable, and profitable business imperative.

Regenerative Futures

The regenerative revolution is underway, offering a compelling narrative for the future of business. Across sectors, companies like  Climeworks and Danone, Greiner and Holcim, demonstrate that restoring the planet and society need not compromise financial success. On the contrary, embedding regeneration can foster innovation, resilience, and long-term growth.

The cases illustrate that regeneration is both practical and scalable, spanning advanced industrial operations, consumer goods, agriculture, finance, and technology. Leadership, purpose, innovative business models, and ecosystem engagement form the pillars of success. Crucially, regeneration shifts the frame from avoiding harm to actively creating positive impact, aligning commercial success with the flourishing of people and planet alike.

In a world facing rapid ecological, social, and economic change, the regenerative revolution is not optional—it is a blueprint for sustainable prosperity, proving that businesses can thrive while restoring the very systems upon which they depend.

The companies above represent different routes to regeneration.

Greiner shows how heavy industry can reorient towards regenerative ends through product design, alliance building and operational decarbonisation. Ecoalf demonstrates how consumer brands can turn environmental restoration (marine clean-ups) into the raw material for premium products, creating jobs and local benefits. Interface and Patagonia reveal the power of governance and supply-chain redesign to make profound claims credible. Danone, Unilever and IKEA underline the systemic leverage of global buyers to alter agricultural and material systems. Vestre and VEJA show that industrial architecture and transparent supply chains can embed environmental renewal into daily life.

What can leaders learn?

  • Integration into Core Strategy: Regeneration is most successful when it is embedded into the business model, rather than treated as an ancillary initiative. Companies like Acciona, IKEA, and Interface exemplify strategic integration, linking financial performance with ecological outcomes.

  • Leadership and Culture: Executive commitment, performance incentives, and cultural alignment are essential. Across the sample, leadership consistently connects vision, operations, and measurable impact — from BayWa’s stewardship ethos to Triodos Bank’s ethical investment principles.

  • Innovation Across Products and Processes: Regeneration is driven by both material and process innovation. Holcim’s carbon-negative cement, PulPac’s fibre-based packaging, and EcoAlf’s marine-waste apparel show that regenerative thinking catalyses new product categories and business opportunities.

  • Ecosystem Thinking: Partnerships with suppliers, communities, NGOs, and governments amplify impact. Ecosystem approaches ensure that regenerative gains are systemic rather than localised, as seen in Climeworks’ carbon capture networks or Wildfarmed’s supply chain interventions.

  • Performance and Measurability: Financial and ecological metrics are increasingly intertwined. European regenerative leaders demonstrate that profit and impact are not mutually exclusive — measurable environmental restoration often correlates with customer loyalty, market differentiation, and operational resilience.

  • Scalability and Replicability: Many of these companies, from Greiner to Arket, show that regenerative models can scale across sectors, geographies, and industrial processes, proving that regeneration is commercially viable at multiple levels.None of this is easy. Regeneration requires patient capital, new metrics, policy support and an acceptance that short-term profit optimisation will sometimes be subordinate to long-term ecological and societal value creation. Yet the evidence is mounting that companies can — and some already do — write business models that replenish the natural and social capital on which all commerce ultimately depends.

Across sectors and geographies, Europe’s regenerative leaders reveal a new paradigm for business—one in which strategic purpose, leadership, innovation, ecosystem engagement, and measurable impact converge. Their approaches show that companies can go beyond sustainability, actively restoring natural systems, empowering communities, and generating commercial value.

In a world facing escalating ecological and social challenges, these examples provide a blueprint for business transformation, proving that regeneration is both a moral and economic imperative.

More from Peter Fisk

For over a century, the boardroom has been a place of authority, oversight, and assurance. Directors assessed risk, monitored performance, and protected continuity. In a stable world, this approach was sufficient. But stability is now a luxury few businesses can afford.

We live in an era of relentless change: markets shift at unprecedented speed, technologies converge, customer expectations evolve, and environmental and social imperatives demand urgent action. The rules of competition are being rewritten, often overnight. In such a world, a board that governs only the status quo risks not only irrelevance, but the survival of the business itself.

Enter The Boardroom Compass: a three-day immersive retreat for company boards, designed to equip directors to navigate complexity, make sense of emerging opportunities, and act decisively in shaping the long-term future.

The program is conceived and led by Peter Fisk, a globally recognised authority on business leadership, strategy, and reinvention, together with Pierre Kairouz, a seasoned expert in board governance and executive leadership. Their combined experience ensures the retreat is at once visionary and grounded, stretching thinking while remaining practically actionable.

Why boards must evolve

Boards are no longer merely custodians of performance; they are architects of the future. The most successful boards:

  • Think strategically with courage, imagination, and a long-term lens.
  • Align business models, strategies, and organisational design to a compelling purpose.
  • Embed transformation not only in plans, but in culture, leadership, and capabilities.
  • Engage stakeholders across generations, from Gen Z to ageing populations, balancing divergent expectations.
  • Understand the strategic impact of AI, data, and convergent technologies, and use these insights to guide opportunity and risk.

Without this evolution, boards risk being reactive, marginalised, or unable to support their CEOs in delivering transformational change.

The Boardroom Compass

The Boardroom Compass is built around a central idea: boards must navigate the future with clarity, courage, and collaboration.

It provides directors with:

  • A structured framework for understanding disruptive forces and strategic inflection points.
  • Exposure to global examples of business reinvention and organisational transformation.
  • Tools to translate insight into actionable guidance for executive teams.
  • Opportunities to strengthen cohesion, alignment, and confidence in decision-making.

Importantly, it is not a management course. Participants remain firmly in the boardroom seat, exploring the implications of emerging trends, assessing strategic options, and sharpening their stewardship capabilities.

Key themes explored

1. Making Sense of the Future

Boards are bombarded with information but often starved of insight. The retreat helps directors distinguish between transient noise and enduring signals, using scenario thinking to explore plausible futures and anticipate strategic inflection points.

2. Strategy as a Dynamic Capability

Static, annualised strategies are insufficient. Boards are guided on how to oversee strategy as a living system, continuously adapting to market changes, technological shifts, and stakeholder expectations. Companies like Amazon and Microsoft exemplify this, demonstrating boards’ role in endorsing ambition while ensuring feasibility.

3. Technology and Convergent Forces

AI, robotics, data analytics, and platform technologies are no longer optional tools; they are central to value creation. Boards explore the implications of emerging technologies on business models, ethics, and competitive advantage.

4. Stakeholders and Trust

Trust is now a strategic asset. Boards consider how to engage stakeholders authentically, balancing generational expectations, social legitimacy, and customer experience. Examples from Unilever, Patagonia, and On Running illustrate purpose-led engagement as a driver of growth and resilience.

5. Board–CEO Partnership

Future-ready boards are active partners in transformation. They provide guidance, mentorship, and air cover for bold decisions without overstepping into operational management, enhancing the CEO’s ability to deliver strategic outcomes.

Global examples of board-supported transformation

  • Microsoft: Alongside CEO Satya Nadella, the board endorsed a shift from defending legacy software to a cloud and AI-driven platform strategy, supporting a growth mindset culture.
  • DBS Bank: Singapore’s most innovative bank reimagined itself as a “tech company in banking,” with the board sponsoring agile teams and digital-first leadership.
  • Schneider Electric: Transitioned from hardware to IoT-enabled services, with board oversight ensuring sustainability, digital capability, and organisational alignment.
  • Lego: Board guidance enabled a return from near-bankruptcy to global innovation leadership through purpose-aligned strategy and a culture of creativity.

These examples underscore that board-level stewardship is critical to both bold ambition and successful execution.

The Boardroom Compass Program Outline

Duration: 3 days
Format: Immersive, interactive, and board-focused, combining global insight with applied exercises.

Day 1 … Navigating the Strategic Horizon

  • Purpose and Vision: Explore why the organisation exists, define long-term ambitions, and clarify what success looks like.
  • Global Disruptors: Examine megatrends, technologies, change drivers and risks across sectors.
  • Business Reinvention: How companies around the world are reinventing themselves for the future.
  • Strategic Priorities: Identify opportunities, risks, and five-year growth imperatives.

Day 2 … Reimagining the Organisation

  • Leadership for the Future: Assess leadership gaps, mindset shifts, and behaviours required to deliver transformation.
  • Culture and Values: Analyse current culture, design future culture to support strategy, and embed purpose-led decision-making.
  • Organisation Design: Explore agile, platform, and hybrid structures to match strategic ambitions.
  • Capabilities and Ecosystems: Identify talent, technology, and partnership requirements critical to execution.

Day 3 … Guiding Transformation

  • Alignment and Integration: Map strategy to organisational structure and capabilities, ensuring coherence and feasibility.
  • Phased Transformation Roadmap: Define waves of change, KPIs, and governance mechanisms.
  • Ownership and Commitment: Assign responsibility, clarify accountability, and establish ongoing engagement.
  • Future-Ready Board: Reflect on insights, define personal and collective commitments, and embed the future-ready mindset.

Outcomes for boards

Participants leave The Boardroom Compass with:

  • Strategic Clarity: A shared understanding of long-term direction, risks, and opportunities.
  • Organisational Insight: Recognition of the culture, leadership, and capabilities needed to succeed.
  • Actionable Roadmap: A phased, realistic, and prioritised plan for transformation and value creation.
  • Enhanced Board Cohesion: Greater confidence, alignment, and ability to challenge constructively.
  • Future-Ready Mindset: Capability to navigate uncertainty, embrace emerging technologies, and guide the executive team with courage and foresight.

Future-ready boards

The boardroom of the future is not a passive hall of oversight; it is a space for active stewardship, bold thinking, and long-term impact. The Boardroom Compass is a novel and inspiring program that helps boards navigate the uncertainty of today to ensure the prosperity of tomorrow. By combining deep insight, practical frameworks, and global inspiration, it equips directors to lead with clarity, courage, and confidence – turning strategic foresight into meaningful action.

In an era of relentless change, boards that embrace this shift are not merely guardians of value, they are architects of it.

“Strategic foresight” –  or as I prefer to call it, leading the business from the future back – is rapidly becoming a core leadership capability. In a world defined by accelerating change, deep uncertainty and constant disruption, the leaders and organisations that consistently outperform are not those that predict the future most accurately, but those that anticipate change earlier, make better decisions today, and actively shape what comes next rather than reacting to it.

For much of the last century, leadership was about optimisation. Competitive advantage was built through scale, efficiency and control. Strategy assumed continuity, and planning largely meant extrapolating the past. That logic no longer holds. Today, any advantage is temporary, industry boundaries are porous, and shocks propagate across systems faster than traditional planning cycles can respond.

“Thinking like a futurist” is no longer a niche skill or an innovation luxury. It is a leadership discipline, one that connects long-term possibility to near-term performance, and imagination to execution.

Over the past two decades, one of the most powerful tools I have worked with leadership teams to embed — across food and fashion, travel and telecoms, energy and entertainment — is strategic foresight integrated directly into strategy, innovation, portfolio management and capital allocation. When foresight is embedded properly, it consistently drives better growth, stronger margins, lower risk and more durable value creation.

Why business leaders need a future mindset

The case for a future mindset is both strategic and economic.

First, the pace of change is accelerating faster than traditional planning cycles. Technology adoption curves are compressing. Consumer expectations reset annually, not generationally. Regulation, geopolitics and climate risk increasingly reshape markets with little warning. In this environment, five-year plans become obsolete within months if they are not continuously refreshed.

Second, the nature of value itself has changed. Today, over half of corporate value is driven by intangible, future-facing assets: brands, ideas, data, platforms, ecosystems and capabilities that determine tomorrow’s growth rather than yesterday’s efficiency. These assets are shaped by choices made long before results appear in financial statements.

As a result, companies that anticipate change earlier consistently outperform those that react later. Across sectors, they:

  • Innovate more successfully, with higher hit rates and faster scaling
  • Deliver stronger profitability and faster, more resilient growth
  • Allocate capital more effectively, exiting declining assets earlier and investing sooner in future growth platforms
  • Build future-ready organisations that attract talent, partners and long-term investors

At the heart of this performance gap is a shift in mindset.

Business leaders who think like futurists move:

  • From analysing the past to imagining better futures
  • From seeking certainty to building agility and preparedness
  • From optimising the present to continuously reinventing for what comes next

Today still matters — but always in the context of tomorrow.

What it means to think like a futurist

Thinking like a futurist is not about prediction. It is about perspective.

Futurist leaders start from the future back, rather than extrapolating the past forward. They define what success could look like five to ten years from now, then work backwards to identify the strategic choices, capabilities and investments required today.

They learn outside-in more than inside-out. External signals — from customers, culture, technology, regulation and adjacent industries — carry more weight than internal reports optimised around existing structures.

They look beyond competitors to understand how value is shifting across ecosystems, not just within categories. The most disruptive threats — and the most powerful opportunities — often come from outside the industry frame.

Crucially, futurist leaders are able to see signals in the noise. They do this by:

  • Making sense of megatrends such as climate change, demographics, technology acceleration and geopolitical realignment
  • Identifying patterns across markets, consumers and categories, not just within one business unit
  • Focusing on intersections, where trends multiply and new value pools emerge

Over time, foresight becomes a leadership skill built on four capabilities:

  • Curiosity: actively seeking unfamiliar perspectives and challenging orthodoxies
  • Sense-making: turning weak signals into strategic meaning
  • Future-back thinking: defining long-term success and working backwards
  • Making better choices: using foresight as the starting point for strategy and innovation decisions

How leading companies use foresight

Leading companies do not use foresight as a theoretical exercise. They embed it directly into decision-making, with tangible impact on both short- and long-term performance.

Example 1. Disney: backcasting the future of experience

Disney’s evolution from a traditional animation studio into a multi-platform entertainment ecosystem is the result of deliberate future thinking. Rather than extrapolating from the present, Disney frequently uses backcasting — defining a desired future state and working backwards to determine what capabilities, technologies and acquisitions are required to get there.

When Disney asks, “What will immersive storytelling look like in 2040?”, the answer shapes decisions made today — from acquisitions such as Pixar, Marvel and Lucasfilm to investments in theme parks, streaming platforms and experiential technologies.

Disney also maintains a dedicated strategic foresight capability that works directly with the C-suite, identifying disruptive “black swan” events — from pandemics to shifts in travel behaviour — and exploring their implications long before they materialise. The result is not agility alone, but coherence across decades.

Example 2. Shell: making uncertainty governable

Shell is widely regarded as the pioneer of corporate foresight. Its scenarios team has been operating for more than half a century, famously helping the company navigate the oil shocks of the 1970s by having already rehearsed a world of volatile prices and geopolitical disruption.

What distinguishes Shell is not the quality of its scenarios, but how they are used. Shell does not attempt to predict a single future. Instead, it develops multiple, radically different “possible worlds” — and stress-tests strategy and investments against each of them.

Foresight at Shell is not advisory. It is institutionalised. No major capital project proceeds without a scenario resilience check. In effect, foresight functions as a governance mechanism, forcing leaders to confront uncomfortable possibilities before committing billions. Uncertainty is not eliminated — it is made manageable.

Example 3. Unilever: using the future as a strategic constraint

Unilever stands out for its deeply outside-in approach, particularly around social and environmental megatrends. Through its Sustainable Living Plan — now evolved into the Unilever Compass — the company integrated foresight into its brand and portfolio strategy. Instead of asking what competitors are doing, Unilever asks what the world will require.

What does it mean to operate within planetary boundaries? What will consumers expect of brands in a carbon-constrained, resource-limited world? These questions become strategic constraints that shape innovation, sourcing, packaging and marketing decisions today.

Unilever uses “future-fit” benchmarks — measuring brands not just against current market norms, but against what will be necessary by 2030 and beyond. This forces earlier, sometimes uncomfortable, pivots — but builds long-term relevance and trust.

Example 4. Siemens: turning foresight into investment logic

As an industrial technology leader, Siemens has institutionalised foresight through its “Pictures of the Future” methodology.

This approach combines systematic trend scouting with “wild card” analysis — low-probability, high-impact events that could fundamentally reshape markets. The output is not generic trend decks, but detailed future scenarios for specific domains such as energy systems, mobility and urban infrastructure.

Crucially, these future pictures inform R&D roadmaps and portfolio decisions. When foresight suggests that decentralised energy will dominate, Siemens begins reallocating investment away from centralised fossil-based systems years before markets peak. Foresight becomes an early-warning system — and a trigger for capital reallocation.

Example 5. Lego: designing for future relevance

Lego’s turnaround from near-bankruptcy in the early 2000s was built on a profound commitment to foresight and human insight.

The company established a Future Lab that operates with startup-like autonomy, supported by a global scanning network of children, educators, technologists and cultural observers. The goal is not to track toy trends, but to understand how play itself is evolving — cognitively, socially and digitally.

This foresight reshaped Lego’s strategy: expanding into digital gaming, movies and experiences, while simultaneously investing in sustainable materials and circular design. It did not abandon its core. It reinterpreted it for the future.

Across these examples, foresight-driven companies consistently do three things differently:

  • Use scenarios to stress-test strategy and challenge assumptions
  • Make earlier moves into future growth categories and value pools
  • Actively reshape portfolios rather than defending legacy assets

In FMCG and adjacent sectors, the practical impact is clear:

  • Faster growth from foresight-aligned brands, within and across categories
  • More resilient margins through relevance and premiumisation
  • Higher return on innovation investment
  • Reduced exposure to regulatory, sustainability and demand shocks

The strategic implications for how we do business

When foresight is embedded effectively, it reshapes the entire operating model.

  • It transforms strategy, shifting organisations from fixed plans to dynamic portfolios that evolve as the future unfolds.
  • It reframes innovation, moving from linear pipelines to portfolios of experiments deliberately spread across time horizons.
  • It strengthens supply chains, evolving transactional supplier relationships into resilient, sustainable partnerships.
  • It redefines talent, shifting from treating people as resources to building the capabilities required to create the future.
  • It changes how organisations approach transformation, moving from crisis-driven change to continuous, future-led renewal.

At a deeper level, foresight drives a fundamental shift in leadership and decision-making:

  • From past-driven, experience-led thinking to future-oriented, possibility-led thinking
  • From assuming incremental change to preparing for non-linear disruption
  • From seeking certainty to building preparedness

Strategic thinking moves from single forecasts to multiple scenarios; from static plans to adaptive pathways; from defending current positions to shaping future markets.

Decision-making evolves from optimising for today to deliberately balancing today and tomorrow; from late reaction to early, proactive moves; from capital locked into plans to capital dynamically reallocated as futures evolve.

Innovation shifts from product-led pipelines to portfolios of experiments; from incremental improvement to new business models and ecosystems; from technology push to future customer and societal pull.

Portfolio management becomes proactive: reshaping what exists, exiting declining assets earlier, and pursuing growth through new value pools rather than endless extensions.

Leadership style changes too — from control and prediction to curiosity and sense-making; from risk avoidance to intelligent risk-taking; from top-down direction to distributed sensing and learning.

Performance metrics evolve beyond short-term financials towards long-term value creation, resilience and relevance — using leading indicators and strategic options, not just lagging results.

Transformation itself becomes continuous: not episodic change driven by crisis, but foresight-led evolution guided by purpose and future ambition.

The practical tools that deliver foresight

Foresight only creates value when it is actionable. Leading organisations use a small number of powerful tools, applied consistently, to translate insight into decision-making.

Key tools include:

  • Scenario planning: exploring multiple plausible futures to stress-test strategy, investments and assumptions
  • Trend and megatrend analysis: understanding long-term structural forces shaping markets and societies
  • Weak signal scanning: identifying early indicators of emerging change
  • Futures wheel: mapping first-, second- and third-order implications of change
  • Horizon planning: balancing short-term performance with long-term options
  • Backcasting: defining future success and working backwards to today’s choices
  • Portfolio mapping: aligning innovation, brands and investments against future relevance

Used together, these tools create a shared language of the future across leadership teams, enabling faster alignment and better decisions.

The measurable impact of using foresight

Futurist thinking is often misunderstood as speculative or abstract. In practice, when strategic foresight is embedded into everyday decision-making, its impact becomes visible in the metrics that matter most to business leaders: growth, profitability, risk and long-term value.

Organizations that actively use foresight and scenario planning typically outgrow peers by 2–4 percentage points per year over sustained periods. The reason is simple. Leaders place earlier bets on emerging markets, reallocate capital faster as signals shift, and design propositions around future demand rather than past behaviour. Over a decade, even a modest growth premium compounds into 30–50% higher revenues.

Profitability improves not through efficiency alone, but through better strategic choices. Companies that stress-test strategies against multiple futures see 10–20% gains in capital allocation efficiency and 15–25% higher returns from innovation portfolios, while avoiding costly late-stage write-offs. The real advantage often comes from stopping the wrong initiatives earlier, before they absorb time, talent and margin.

The most under-valued benefit is risk reduction. Organizations using scenarios and early-warning systems experience 20–30% lower earnings volatility and recover faster from shocks — whether supply chain disruption, regulatory change or sudden shifts in customer behaviour. They are not immune to disruption; they are simply better prepared for it.

Markets increasingly reward this future readiness. Companies with credible long-term narratives, visible innovation pipelines and optionality in new business models consistently command 10–30% valuation premiums and a lower cost of capital. Investors are no longer buying today’s earnings alone, but confidence in tomorrow’s profit pools.

Taken together, these effects compound. Over time, leaders who think like futurists deliver faster growth, stronger margins, lower strategic risk and higher enterprise value. In a world of accelerating change, foresight is not a luxury. It is a measurable source of competitive advantage

Future-thinking leaders lead differently

Being a futurist is no longer a role confined to innovation teams, strategy units, or external advisors. In a world defined by accelerating change, futurist thinking becomes a core leadership capability.

First, it means shifting from prediction to preparedness. The most effective leaders do not ask, “What will happen?” but “What could happen — and how ready are we?” They create space for exploring multiple futures, stress-testing strategies against uncertainty, and making bolder choices earlier than competitors.

Second, it requires curiosity over certainty. Futurist leaders reward questioning assumptions, scanning beyond their sector, and paying attention to weak signals — cultural shifts, emerging behaviours, regulatory nudges, technological adjacencies — long before they show up in quarterly numbers. They treat foresight not as an occasional exercise, but as a continuous sensing system.

Third, it changes how decisions are made. Rather than optimising only for efficiency or short-term return, futurist leaders balance today’s performance with tomorrow’s options. They invest in capabilities, platforms and ecosystems that keep strategic optionality open — even when the immediate ROI is unclear.

Fourth, it reshapes culture. When leaders consistently reference future scenarios, long-term ambitions and emerging risks, they legitimise long-term thinking across the organisation. Teams become more confident experimenting, more comfortable with ambiguity, and more aligned around a shared direction rather than fixed plans.

Finally, it demands personal courage. Leading from the future back often means challenging dominant mental models, reallocating resources away from legacy successes, and acting before change is obvious. This is uncomfortable — but it is precisely where leadership creates disproportionate value.

The new definition of a futurist

A modern futurist is not a prophet or a technologist obsessed with trends. A futurist is a leader who expands the organisation’s field of vision, connects insight to action, and turns uncertainty into advantage.

In an era where the future arrives faster every year, the greatest risk is not getting the future wrong — it is failing to engage with it at all.

The leaders who thrive will not be those who react best to change, but those who are already living in the future — and deliberately pulling their organisations toward it.

Explore more

Here are some of my best reports and books to help you, free to download:

  • Megatrends 2035 (by Peter Fisk) defines the 6 most radical forces shaking up every market and driving radical business reinvention, from AI and technology convergence, to climate change and social inequality, and much more.
  • Dynamic Strategy Playbook (by Peter Fisk) explores how to reinvent your strategy for a world of change, uncertainty and speed. It embeds foresight into the strategy process, driving better decisions, building a future ready business.
  • Business Recoded: Have the Courage to Create a Better Future (by Peter Fisk) is my latest book that explores the business of the future, and the transformations required to get there.

Also, here are some of the best guides that will help you go further:

  • Playbook for Strategic Foresight and Innovation (by Stanford) is a  structured foresight playbook with methods, tools and a guiding framework for strategic teams.
  • What is Future Readiness? (by Institute for the Future) key chapters from the useful IFTF, who are based in Palo Alto, and one of the world’s best organisation driving foresight thinking, although mostly for private clients.
  • The Strategic Foresight Book (by IFRC Salferino Institute) is a highly practical guidebook to tools that make foresight work, written for public sector organisations but applicable to everyone.

And some of the best global foresight reports, produced annually

  • Global 50 Megatrends and Opportunities 2025 (by Dubai Future Foundation) is a great annual report exploring megatrends and connecting them to new possibilities.
  • Trend Compendium 2025 (by Roland Berger) takes a longer view than most, built around 6 megatrend themes and then diving into the detail of each of them.
  • Tech Trends 2025 (by Future Today) is one of the most comprehensive deep dives into the technology drivers of the future, and how companies are embracing them.