Seeing the Future

Nowadays the vital first step in competing for the future is able to find the industry foresight. I think it’s really important for every companies, because the industry foresight would bring the advantages to the companies such as be the leader of the market and the potential to get the future first. What does industry foresight actually does is that helping the company to get a better understanding than competitors in certain areas like technological, demographic, regulatory, or lifestyle, so that could create new competitive space for the company. There is a very good example in this article about the Japanese auto company Toyota’s foresight in 1970s and 1980s; they use their vision of the future to focus on developing the quality, cycle time, and flexibility of their vehicles. Just like the article said “twenty years later, Toyota’s foresight had become GM’s implementation nightmare”.

How to get the industry foresight is really depend on the management. Top management must see the opportunities not seen by other senior management team. The managers should paint an enticing picture of the new industry space their company hopes to stake out over the next decade. In other words the industry foresight requires full of curiosity and the adventure of future. They need to find out which alliances to form, how much to invest, and what kind people to hire. I also want to point out the impact of virtual reality. “Virtual reality is a technology with profound implications for almost every industry”. VR is not a game or something; it has the ability to simulate anything, for the company they could use the VR to help them set up the internal monitoring function and evaluating the company performance. I really like one sentence from the article “Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want.”

I think the article “seeing the future first” has supplement to chapters two and three. The main point of both chapters...