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“Building the future is really about building the present. Yes, you must be able to see where you want to go, but you will never get there if you spend too much time only looking toward it.”

Maurice Levy, Chairman and CEO of Publicis Group, the world’s fourth largest advertising group, based in Paris.

“For five years in a row, companies in the IRI study have cited “growing the business through innovation” as their biggest problem (…) other top concerns have included “accelerating innovation” and “balancing long-term/short-term R&D objectives/focus” (…) Although U.S. companies are spending more on R&D overall than they have in recent years, they’re putting that money mainly into new project development and neglecting other areas that are important to long-term innovation efforts.”

“Where More R&D Dollars Should Go”, Harvard Business Review, July-August 2007. Jim Scinta is Chair of the Industrial Research Institute’s Research on Research Committee and manager of the heavy oil division in R&D at ConocoPhilips.

I just recalled having seen some commercial aimed to business people which talked about fish with a memory span of less than three seconds. The advertiser is implying that many organizations don’t learn from past actions and do not happen to invest time and efforts to look at what’s next and plan accordingly. Speaking of fish, as far as science is concerned, it appears that even gold fish can actually remember things for a few months instead of just a few seconds. Nonetheless, I think the point made by that commercial about just focusing on short term deliverables and missing the larger picture would be well taken by many.

About ten years ago, when working on one of my early strategy jobs my boss asked me to address the following questions:

1. what do we need to do today to deliver on current business objectives?
2. what do we need to start doing today to remain in business in the future?
3. what is that path between 1 and 2? what are the moving targets?

So one of my projects first involved mapping out current business and technology trends as well as identifying early signals pointing to emerging trends. The outcome of this 3 month exercise came down to scenario planning delivering insights and supporting data on the state of our market and new opportunities followed by specific recommendations and action items. Drawing from that analysis, I eventually took a product management job to launch a new software product. This helped me better understand not only the links between strategy and implementation but also the pressing business needs driving the short term focus of those working on revenue generating products.

Striking the right balance between work that needs to be done today for both the present and the future of the business is not piece of cake. This is a dilemma even when conducting research for innovative projects. For instance, do you focus your research budget on understanding and addressing today’s unmet customer needs or do you focus on engineering a solution based on how those needs and problem statements might evolve, let’s say a year or two from today, or on new ones likely to see the light when your product is scheduled to hit the market?

My take is that by the time I launch a new product I wouldn’t like to base the first release on old news, which might no longer apply to a new market reality. Nonetheless, forecasting and prioritizing what product features are worth first developing is like taking an ride on a roller coaster. So teams either embrace calculated risk taking and/or place their trust on a visionary leader, which is another dilemma I’ll discuss in a future post.

Picture credits: Digital image content © 1997-2007 Hemera Technologies Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Jupiter Images Corp. All Rights Reserved.

J. de Francisco
Chicago, 26 May 08

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