Curated Newsletter Series: Leadership & Business Strategy
This post curates TBD Futures newsletter articles on leadership and business strategy, organized by theme, for executives and senior leaders who want to move from reactive planning to foresight-led decision-making.
The questions separating leaders who shape their industries from those who react to them:
Are you running your organization on a strategy built for the world as it was, or the one taking shape right now?
When 84% of executives say innovation is critical to growth but only 6% are satisfied with their results, what's actually getting in the way?
How do you break out of quarterly pressure long enough to make the decisions that determine where your organization stands in five years?
What does it look like to lead with foresight rather than just resilience?
Is your competitive advantage built on something that will still be scarce in ten years?
Most strategic planning processes are better at capturing the past than anticipating the future. They measure what's already happened, benchmark against who's already ahead, and optimize for conditions that may not hold. The leaders who consistently outperform don't just plan better. They see differently. Companies with robust foresight practices are 33% more profitable and achieve 200% higher growth than peers who don't build that capability deliberately. The articles below show what that looks like in practice, across innovation strategy, growth frameworks, leadership mindset, and the organizational conditions that make it all possible.
Articles in This Series
On Innovation & Growth Strategy
A Secret Sauce for Growth: Why Futures Thinking Unlocks What Traditional Strategy Misses 84% of executives say innovation is critical to their growth strategy. Only 6% are satisfied with their results. The gap isn't ambition. It's methodology. This piece makes the case for going beyond market data and competitive benchmarking to the underlying forces shaping where your market is heading, and shows why the organizations finding white space are the ones willing to study the "why" behind consumer behavior, not just the "what."
Create Innovative Certainties: How Top Performers Navigate Uncertainty and Seize Growth A McKinsey study of over 1,000 companies worldwide reveals that top economic performers are 63% more likely to innovate at scale by building outside their current industries, and 78% more likely to build businesses in different sectors entirely. Innovation during uncertainty isn't reckless. For the companies doing it well, it's the most defensible growth strategy available.
AI: From Cost Center to Growth Catalyst Most organizations are deploying AI to cut costs and automate tasks. That captures roughly none of its strategic potential. This piece makes the case for AI as an innovation engine rather than an efficiency tool, and lays out what leaders need to do differently to move from protecting the bottom line to building the next business model.
On Leadership Mindset & Organizational Foresight
From Firefighting to Future Building: The Case for Foresight-Led Leadership More than half of C-suite leaders say they are likely to leave their current role within two years. CEO turnover hit record highs in 2024. Most leaders know they are too reactive. This piece examines what separates the "Futurist CEOs" who consistently outperform from those who manage well but lead reactively. Shell's OPEC scenario, Airbnb's COVID pivots, Blockbuster's fatal blind spot. The lesson across all of them is the same: scenario planning isn't about being right. It's about being ready.
On Strategy Under Uncertainty
Future-Prepared in the Labyrinth of Uncertainties A practical framework for moving from future-aware to future-prepared to future-active, the three stages most organizations cycle through without ever fully reaching the third. What gets in the way at each stage, and what it takes to build genuine strategic agility rather than a once-a-year planning exercise.
Becoming Future-Active: Defining the Entrepreneurial Frontiers with Futures The most overlooked stage of futures thinking is acting on it. This piece is for leaders and entrepreneurs who want to move from analysis to competitive positioning, using foresight not just to understand what's coming but to define where they want to play in it.
The Future-Charged Startup What distinguishes the startups that define new categories from the ones that execute well and still get disrupted? A look at the foresight practices baked into the founding DNA of organizations built to lead rather than follow.
A Note on How I Think About Leadership Strategy (the TBD Futures Perspective)
The leaders I respect most are not the ones who predicted the future correctly. They are the ones who built organizations capable of responding well to futures they didn't predict. That's a different capability, and it requires different tools.
Strategy built on historical data and competitive benchmarking is necessary but not sufficient. What it misses is the layer underneath: the emerging forces, shifting values, and structural changes that don't show up in last quarter's numbers but will define next decade's market. That's the work I do with clients, and it's what this body of writing is built around.
Explore more at TBD Futures or get in touch to talk about building a strategy that holds up across the futures actually worth preparing for.
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