How did BYD go from making batteries to becoming the worldâs top seller of EV cars? How can a company like Nvidia give its software away for free and still emerge as one of the most valuable companies in the world? Through our research at the Future Readiness Center, we have identified three key principles that explain why some companies are future-ready, while others fade away.
Over the past few years, my team and I at the Future Readiness Center have analyzed over 300 companies across industries, including tech, retail, and manufacturing, to figure out what sets the future-ready apart. We created the Future Readiness Indicator to rank companies on how well prepared they are for whatever comes next. What we have found is that some companies consistently turn crisis into opportunity. When there is a downturn, these companies tend to get hurt less, recover faster, and often emerge from turbulent times stronger than before.
Can you make your company future-ready? The answer, I firmly believe, is yes. Future readiness is not a genetic trait or dumb luck; it comes from specific principles and habits that anyone can apply, given the right mindset and culture.
Through our research, we have identified key principles that future-ready organizations (and people) embrace. These principles are drawn from our research at the Future Readiness Center and illustrated by real stories â stories of companies like Yamaha, BYD, and Nvidia, who have stayed ahead by being future-ready.
The first principle of future readiness is the paradox of perform and transform. Future-ready companies consistently deliver today and build for tomorrow. They do not flip-flop between focusing on performance and then on innovation â they do both.
Many companies behave like a pendulum: when times are good and the cash is flowing, they will splurge on innovation â fund a flashy new venture, invest in moonshot projects, give employees free beer and ping-pong tables. But the moment the core business hits a bump in the road, the cost cutters come in, chop these âdistractionsâ, and everybody is back to âbusiness as usualâ. This cycle â innovating when it is easy, cutting when times are hard â is deadly. Future-ready organizations, on the other hand, understand that innovation is not a season; it is a habit.
âTo stay ahead, it is important to integrate new knowledge into what you do. â
To illustrate what happens if you donât perform and transform at the same time, consider Steinway and Sons, manufacturer of the best pianos in the world. Over the last fifty years, its fortunes have dwindled, its workshops and factories closed as demand for traditional pianos dropped, fueled by the lack of space in modern homes for traditional pianos and their costly upkeep. The 2008 financial crisis hit the company hard, and by 2013, this legendary company, founded in Manhattan in 1853, found itself having to sell to a private equity company.
Meanwhile, in Japan, Yamaha quietly did something different. It automated and produced upright pianos and affordable instruments for small homes. This was not glamorous, but scalable. Yamaha exported across Southeast Asia and built a rock-solid balance sheet. At the peak of its rise, Yamaha bought Steinway pianos, took them apart piece by piece, and studied every single component to the point that Steinwayâs own CEO admitted that he was not sure who knew their product better, Yamaha or Steinway. In 2017, Yamaha released its 10th generation of digital pianos that could perfectly replicate a Steinway’s sound â for a tenth of the price.
The truth is that craftsmanship alone could not save Steinway. To stay ahead, it is important to integrate new knowledge into what you do. Steinway & Sons may make the best pianos, but as tastes, lifestyles, and tech changed, new âcapabilitiesâ mattered â and Steinwayâs business dwindled. Meanwhile, Yamaha kept adding new capabilities such as electronics and mass production on top of their strong musical instrument heritage.
Where most companies fail is that they think transformation is about making one big bet on the future. The reality is that nobody knows what product the next blockbuster will be.
Take Chinese EV manufacturer BYD as an example of a company that has continuously learnt and upskilled, allowing it to quickly pivot and eventually translate new skills into a profit engine. BYD started in the 1990s as a battery company, making rechargeable batteries for devices like phones and laptops.
By the early 2000s, that market was saturated, so BYD had a choice: stagnate or upskill. The management asked themselves where else batteries are needed. At the time, China, Taiwan, and Thailand were experiencing huge demand for electric bicycles and scooters. BYD started to make e-bikes and scooters, which was their first step into vehicles. Next, they asked: âWhat else can we electrify that will not put us in direct head-to-head with established car giants yet?â Their answer: buses. BYD started building electric buses and sold these to cities in China and other countries looking to reduce pollution.
Each step of the way, BYD was scaling up its capabilities and upskilling. By the time BYD decided to make EV vehicles, it was not a battery startup anymore â it was a vertically integrated powerhouse with massive factories, advanced battery tech, and vehicle manufacturing experience. This allowed it to take on the traditional car manufacturers, and by 2024, it became the worldâs leading seller of EV cars.
This leads to a crucial point: all new capabilities start as experiments. In our research, we found that future-ready organizations excel at experimentation and scaling. These companies have many pilot projects on the go, all with limited internal red tape. Once an experiment shows promise, future-ready companies scale it; this could mean shutting down other promising projects to funnel resources to the most promising ones.
In a future-ready organization, admitting a projectâs failure is seen as evidence of learning, not incompetence. Future-ready companies embrace transparency and ensure successes and failures are shared and learned from, not swept under the rug. That is total ownership and complete transparency in action.
In the modern world, some of the most explosive innovations and growth have come from those who know how to harness the power of many. Future-ready organizations excel at building platforms, partnerships, and ecosystems that let them leverage external ideas and resources. These companies make it easy for others to innovate with them and on their behalf.
Back in the 1990s, Nvidia, the semiconductor company whose chips today power everything from artificial intelligence to cryptocurrency mining, was a graphics card maker for video games. Nvidiaâs core strength was that its graphics processing units (GPUs) were very good at parallel processing â meaning they could handle lots of calculations at the same time, which was great for rendering graphics. But outside of video games, few people cared about parallel computing.
Nvidia could have stayed a gaming hardware company, and that would have been fine, for a while. Instead, they did something genius: they decided to make it ridiculously easy for other people to use their GPUs for their own ideas. Nvidia created a software platform called CUDA, which allowed programmers to harness GPU power using common programming languages (like C++). In short, Nvidia opened up its technology so that anyone, from researchers to students to startups, could use it.
What happened next is that innovation exploded. Researchers at Stanford figured out you could use GPUs to train neural networks, resulting in a big leap in AI. A team at Google realized GPUs were great for machine translation, resulting in better Google Translate. Scientists started using GPUs for a wide range of applications, from weather modeling to financial risk simulations and medical imaging. Nvidia did not have to predict all these uses; they just provided the shovel in a gold rush.
It is no exaggeration to say that Nvidiaâs rise in the last decade â riding the AI wave especially â was hugely accelerated by this ecosystem approach. It had invested billions of dollars into developing CUDA and its software stack, and then it gave it away for free. Wall Street analysts thought Nvidia was insane. But here is what the analysts missed: once you built on CUDA, switching costs became astronomical, so it is almost impossible for these companies to move away from using Nvidiaâs GPUs.
How can you apply this principle? Start by asking: How easy are we to work with? For customers, for suppliers, for startup partners, for outside developers, and even for other departments internally. Working with others could mean opening up APIs to your software so others can integrate with you; running hackathons or challenges, inviting the outside world to solve a problem using your data; creating a formal program to collaborate with startups, or funding research at universities in areas of interest.
These principles foster what we call Future Readiness â a state where you are not predicting the future, but you are prepared for whatever it brings. You do not have to master everything overnight. Just aim to be one inch ahead.
Howard Yu was a speaker at the Nordic Business Forum 2025 in Helsinki, Finland, on 24 September 2025.
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