In a classic article they wrote for the Harvard Business Review (July 1994 issue), Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad share their thoughts about how to create the future by asking the right questions and then obtaining the right answers. As they explain:

“Organizational transformation must be driven by a point of view about the future of the industry: How do we want this industry to be shaped in five or ten years? What must we do to ensure that the industry evolves in a way that is maximally advantageous for us? What skills and capabilities must we begin building now if we are to occupy the industry high ground in the future? How should we organize for opportunities that may not fit neatly within the boundaries of current business units and divisions? Since most companies don’t start with a shared view of the future, senior managers’ first task is to develop a process for pulling together the collective wisdom within an organization. Concern for the future, a sense of where opportunities lie, and an understanding of organizational change are not the province of any group; people from all levels of a company can help define the future.

“We meet many managers who describe their companies as “market leaders.” (With enough creativity in delimiting market boundaries, almost any company can claim to be a market leader.) But market leadership today certainly doesn’t equal market leadership tomorrow. Think about two sets of questions:

“If senior executives don’t have reasonably detailed answers to the “future” questions, and if the answers they have are not significantly different from the “today” answers, there is little chance that their companies will remain market leaders. The market a company dominates today is likely to change substantially over the next ten years. There’s no such thing as “sustaining” leadership; it must be regenerated again and again.”

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Their article is adapted from Competing for the Future, published by Harvard Business School Press in September 1994.

An influential business thinker, Gary Hamel is cofounder of Strategos and director of the Management Lab. He latest book is The Future of Management. C.K. Prahalad was the Paul and Ruth McCracken Distinguished University Professor of Strategy at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business. He wrote this article, his 16th for HBR, before he passed away on April 16, 2010.

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