2010: Malaise or Renaissance?
Business Success May Depend on a Subtle Shift in Mindset
by
Thomas Schinkel
December 2009
What can we expect in 2010? Pondering what the immediate future will bring is a popular pastime, especially at year’s end. There are plenty of prognosticators out there who will tell you with the utmost certainty that one group of trends or another will prevail. Economic growth, unemployment, housing starts, the condition of real estate markets, the stock market — the targets are too numerous to begin to list. It serves no practical purpose to parrot any of those predictions here.
Does 2010 have a malaise in store for us or will it be the beginning of a Renaissance for America? My own sense is that there are so may unresolved issues that it is too early to tell. In other words, not much of a forecast!
But I do want to draw attention to something more subtle, less tangible and definitely not measurable by the sort of mainstream metric that economists love. It has to do with a subtle shift in thinking about business and strategy, the traditional domain of the Chief Executive Officer. How to structure the organization, how to allocate capital, innovate in house or acquire knowledge from the outside, etc. – in the traditional paradigm the CEO is in charge of planning for the company’s growth, especially long-term. This mindset is captured in the following drawing:
But the crisis of 2008/2009 has shaken up many conventions and traditions, and today
