Published 13 February 2025 in Future readiness • 7 min read • 
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How can companies become future-ready in a world that feels increasingly unknowable? Our research has taught us one important lesson: the companies set to win the future have embraced thoughtful expansion and refrained from aggressive growth.
Whether geopolitics, the environment, or customer behavior, everything appears increasingly erratic and hard to predict, and it feels impossible to plan for the long term with any certainty. Given that future-readiness seems an even tougher goal for most companies, it’s all the more important to look at the outliers bucking the trend. These are companies consistently able to adjust and adapt over time while unpacking and realizing the deeper behaviors they have embraced so they always remain a fraction ahead. It’s the essence and mechanics of this capability, which has the power to resonate across sectors and industries, that my team and I try to identify, assess, and understand.
Every year, we produce the Future-Readiness Indicator – a ranking of top global companies that goes far beyond measuring financial performance. We investigate what each company does through a 360-degree assessment based on publicly available hard data: no surveys, no personal judgment, just facts. We assess factors such as their near-term financial health, new product launches, research and development intensity, diversity of talent, cash and debt ratios, and innovation traction in the marketplace. In other words, we are obsessed with how a small group of companies, despite inevitable near-term fluctuations, manage to trend at the top year after year. What can this teach organizations looking to become more future-ready?
In the latest rankings, we cover big names from the worlds of fashion, technology, and pharmaceuticals. We want to know what lessons we can learn from their wins and struggles. What are the behaviors and mindsets of future-ready companies, and how does that contrast with less well-prepared organizations? What lessons can others learn as we move into 2025?
Two companies jumped out in fashion: the luxury brand that went through “thoughtful expansion” to reinforce its strengths while building for the future and the famous sneaker brand that lost its way. Let’s take the latter first. The fall of Nike from first to fourth place in our ranking serves as a cautionary tale of what happens when companies don’t quite get the balance right between managing the present and looking ahead. In its rush to reinvent itself and embrace direct-to-consumer sales, Nike strayed from its core performance-focused identity. As the US giant, under recently departed CEO John Donahoe, had shifted its focus to online sales, it began pulling back from traditional retail partnerships with outlets like Foot Locker, DSW, and Urban Outfitters. Independent shops, skater stores, and small boutiques that had long been the arbiters of what was cool in youth culture were also cut out of the equation.
The short-term results from this pivot during the pandemic and up until 2023 were great for sales, but they left a vacuum that Nike’s competitors were all too happy to fill. Brands like On, Hoka, adidas, and New Balance snapped up the shelf space Nike left behind, quickly gaining traction with customers who had once been Nike loyalists.
The shift in strategy was about more than distribution. Internally, Donahoe had leaned heavily on efficiency at the expense of creativity. He eliminated some product categories, organizing them by gender rather than sport. This diluted the brand’s expertise in areas like basketball, tennis, and track and field, again leaving room for competitors to fill the gaps. Nike products began to feel more generic and less cutting-edge, and its marketing lost some of its spark. Once known for powerful, emotive storytelling, the brand moved toward a more data-driven, analytical approach.
Thoughtfulness is key when it comes to future-readiness. That’s how Hermès achieved a perfect score in this year’s indicator. While other luxury brands raced to embrace digital strategies and aggressive growth, Hermès chose “thoughtful expansion”, prioritizing cultural relevance over rapid scaling up. LVMH followed a similar path to claim the second spot, demonstrating that, in luxury, slower can indeed mean smarter. Both brands diversified away from China ahead of others while focusing on creating local relevance and redefining what the crucial luxury concepts of exclusivity and prestige mean, even for Generation Z.
This pattern of thoughtful restraint yielding superior results wasn’t limited to fashion – it’s one of the big pan-industry takeaways of 2024. In pharmaceuticals, Roche’s rise to the top spot, with a perfect score, reflects a similar philosophy. While the pharma industry buzzed with excitement over mRNA vaccines and quick wins, Roche maintained a balanced approach to innovation, avoiding the trap that ensnared Pfizer – the risk of over-promising on new technologies. Managing investor expectations while meaningfully scaling new treatment areas has become crucial for success.
In 2025, Novo Nordisk and Eli Lilly must exercise restraint. Both have seen spectacular success with GLP-1 drugs, but their triumph brings new challenges. Eli Lilly’s price-to-earnings ratio has surpassed major tech firms, creating immense pressure to deliver on sky-high expectations. The industry now faces a delicate balancing act between maintaining profitability and ensuring drug accessibility, particularly as GLP-1 therapy costs draw regulatory attention.
The most fascinating example of the “slow and steady wins the race” phenomenon comes from the technology sector, where NVIDIA’s Jensen Huang has rewritten the Silicon Valley playbook. At 61, Huang isn’t the typical tech wunderkind who achieved fame before 30. Instead, his 30-year journey to AI leadership challenges the valley’s obsession with rapid scaling. NVIDIA’s success isn’t a one-hit wonder. The thoughtful persistence with its parallel computing platform and programming model CUDA – investing over $10bn and making it freely available – positioned the company at the center of the AI revolution. What Huang calls a “zero-billion-dollar” strategy seemed foolish when the market didn’t exist, but now it looks like genius.
Meta’s resurgence offers another compelling example of this new paradigm. Under Mark Zuckerberg’s leadership, Meta has aggressively invested in AI despite Wall Street skepticism. The company’s “AI Abundance” strategy has transformed its advertising effectiveness and content feed performance, maintaining a healthy 28% free cashflow-to-revenue ratio despite high infrastructure costs. What’s remarkable isn’t just the investment in AI but how Meta is using it to enhance cultural relevance across its platforms.
What emerges from our analysis of these big companies in 2024? A profound shift in the factors driving business success. Future-ready companies don’t just chase easy growth, straightforward revenue, and investor adoration. Instead, they think about hedging risk thoughtfully and developing deeper capabilities that will be necessary no matter what the world throws at them.
The global business landscape faces even more complexity from rising geopolitical tensions in 2025. Donald Trump’s proposed economic policies – particularly aggressive tariffs – are forcing companies across sectors to rethink their strategies.
We are all standing behind what philosophers call the “veil of ignorance” – no one can perfectly predict what’s coming. Yet future-ready companies are better prepared for what lies ahead than their competitors. To win today while simultaneously preparing themselves to win tomorrow, they scale up new capabilities thoughtfully without abandoning their traditional strengths or growing too fast.
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