By: Jerry Tarasofsky
Louis Pasteur is said to have coined this phrase in response to colleagues who were mocking his discovery of pasteurization as pure luck.
The organization equivalent of a prepared mind is the capability of market foresight. Fortune favors forward-looking organizations that scan their environment for emerging trends and use their expanding awareness for proactive management. Specifically market foresight relies on identifying changing customer values and needs, monitoring the evolving competitive field, and anticipating which capabilities may become the new basis for competitive advantage. A company with the capability of ‘Market Foresight’ establishes practices for gathering and making sense of such information on a regular basis.
Fortune will favor such efforts with breakthrough innovations and superior results.
Building the Capability of Market Foresight
Market foresight is too important to be assigned to one person or even to one department. Market foresight will flourish within an organization that enlists the cooperation of all of its employees. The key message to the entire workforce should be “help us steadily improve, don’t simply adjust to the status quo”. Organizations may not realize that some of their messages are counter productive, messages such as “don’t argue with success” or “if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it”. Employees quickly recognize how open management really is to hearing about current problems and how willing management is to encourage anticipating future trends.
Consciously building a capability of market foresight takes foresight out of the ‘once-in-a-while’ category. Management can support the building of this capability by using hindsight, learning from mistakes, to develop foresight. The enemy of foresight is shortsightedness, short-term thinking. The friend of foresight is ideal striving, envisioning desired futures and proactively seeking to progress toward them.
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[Moderators Comments: This post is based on material that my late partner Max Garfinkle had prepared in the mid 90’s.]
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Hi Jerry,
This rings very true. I have been in several organisations which did not look beyond their current products. However, there also has to be a balance between listening to customers and openness and executing for today. I have had too many bright young MBAs who think that they can spend all day strategising. I always tell them that unless they get out in the market they wont know what to strategise about.
Regards,
Brewster