Crafting Long-Term Strategy in a Chaotic World

This piece was originally published on the Frost & Sullivan New Product Innovation & Development newsletter. A big thanks to Patricia Jacoby for editing and feedback.

The “never” normal, the age of disruption, late-stage capitalism, VUCA world: our era is not lacking in labels, nor in excitement. The apocryphal “Chinese” curse definitely applies: we’re living in interesting times. If you’re a median manager, you’ve spent most of your life in a stable, democratic country, as part of an educated elite; you may have seen true disruption on the TV, but you’ve been continuously shielded from the worst effects of it. Until now.

If we needed any more proof that no one is safe from VUCA, just watch the world’s most powerful country brought to its knees by a pandemic, and its president hospitalized a month away from Election Day. So it is with cities: watch New York City, the world’s financial center and home of Billionaire Row, try to survive the triple-whammy of COVID onslaught, downward-spiraling tax revenue, and growing costs from climate chaos. And so it is with businesses in every industry, even the most stable and established.

So how can we be strategic in this reality?

The future is faster — and crazier — than you think

The bad news is that the world is not going to get boring again any time soon; indeed, it’s going to get worse before it gets better:

• According to Geoffrey…