What trends could affect your business?

Strategic leaders look beyond just hurdling over today’s problems.

THINK ON IT: What trends could affect your business?

As leaders in our organization, it’s so easy to get bogged down each day’s priorities. But strategic leadership looks ahead to focus on what’s next, to determine what deserves our attention tomorrow, instead of merely jumping over the problems of today.

The big trend occupying many leaders today is what to do about artificial intelligence. As important as that technology is to consider, there may be other less noticeable trends taking place that could even more profoundly affect your business.

Cultivating sensitivity to the shifting changes in markets, technologies, and competition is essential to skating to where the puck will be, as the Great One Wayne Gretzky once put it. If our only focus is where the puck is, on our critical urgent matters, we may miss a better opportunity ahead. 

The best leaders don’t just lead their organization where it is right now; the best leaders can see where the world is headed and how to take their organization on a journey toward what’s next, keeping pace with the rate of change — or better yet, creating the pace of change. 

Just imagine if Amazon had remained an online store that only sold books, rather than expanding to offer the myriad of services it does today. 

Imagine if Apple had stuck to Macs, they would have missed creating a huge subscription ecosystem around their tech. 

Consider what would have become of Netflix had it stuck with DVD delivery. They’d be another Blockbuster. 

The leaders of those companies saw the next trend coming, and they optimized their business to take advantage of it. 

If you haven’t lifted your head up out of your own organizational cloud to look around in a while, here’s your invitation to do so. Today. 

“Figuring out what the next big trend is tells us what we should focus on.” — Mark Zuckerberg

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