What does it mean to be future–ready?
In today’s business environment, it means getting ready for the post pandemic world. Corporate success depends on one’s preparedness for future disruptions. Becoming future-ready is the source of resilience.
The Future Readiness Indicator is designed to measure a company’s readiness for deep, long-term, secular trends. We use a rule-based methodology to arrive at a composite score for each company and enable us to identify industry leaders. We can then investigate a company’s behaviors and attitudes.
This year’s Future Readiness Indicator features four industries:
Top Press Highlights
Key findings
Future-ready organizations “leap” repeatedly. They have leaped from their historic areas of expertise to new knowledge: they are outward-looking; they are curious; they assimilate new concepts from other industries. You can learn more about the concept of leaping by clicking here.
Within each industry, highly ranked companies repeatedly reinvent themselves. They redefine how to design and manufacture their products, or they reimagine how to deliver their services.
More about our research methods on building the Indicator and on textual analysis
Among sportswear brands, for example, companies such as Lululemon or Nike command the highest degree of future-readiness. These brands are oriented towards learning, and that attitude correlates with an outstanding total return for investors.
Financial powerhouses such as Mastercard and Visa have attained top rankings by co-opting new competition. It's the logic of “frenemies.” Sometimes a disruptor is not an enemy, but can be a friend: “If you can’t beat them, enlist them to be your partner.” That is the new logic in the financial industry, which payment companies have mastered.
No industry is more distressed than automotive. Disruption is meeting industry convergence, and the global semiconductor shortage is the prelude to what’s to come, so it’s little wonder the automakers are also the least optimistic. Except Tesla.
In technology, we will show you who can save us from the world’s semiconductor shortage. You’ll learn why Microsoft is thriving and IBM is languishing. Technology is an industry where clock speed is extreme, andno one can keep their leadership position for long. This is how Apple lost podcasting – named after its own iPod – to Spotify.
