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How a Business Leader Can Think Like a Futurist
Advice from futurism consultants on how businesses can brace for the future
This is the time of year when we’re primed to look ahead. In recent weeks, you’ve probably laid out personal and professional goals, plans, and road maps for the next 12 months. And if you’re doing it on behalf of an entire company, you’re thinking even further into the future. Or at least you should be.
Even a year can feel like a lifetime away, especially when it’s hard to predict what will happen in the next quarter. But futurists, people who think and write about what’s to come, advise that CEOs need to be thinking years or even decades down the road.
Remember that the future doesn’t just happen — we shape it every day.
I interviewed three prominent futurists — Alexandra Levit, a partner at the consulting firm PeopleResults and author of Humanity Works: Merging Technologies and People for the Workforce of the Future; Mahrinah von Schlegel, executive director of the technology-focused nonprofit Embassy2.0; and writer Richard Watson, a lecturer at Imperial College London and author of the What’s Next report — about how business leaders can get themselves into a more future-oriented mindset.
