Introduction

Own the future.

This is a statement of purpose. If leaders are to win, if they are to put their stamp on tomorrow, they must decide to do so today.

It is also a statement of priorities. To own the future, leaders must do two things.

First, and very fundamentally, they need to win in the marketplace. This is the competitive imperative. Simply put, they need to own—or control—more business than their rivals. In doing so, they will earn the right to wield greater economic power and gain access to more opportunities for growth and value creation.

Second, they need to be accountable for their actions. This is the social imperative. A core tenet of ownership is that with rights come responsibilities. In practice, this means that leaders can't carry out a slash-and-burn strategy in pursuit of a quick buck. Instead, they must commit to the long view, to building a sustainable business.

Resolving to “own the future” is one thing. Doing so is quite another—and altogether more challenging.

How can you own the future?

This question triggered the creation of our book. As part of the effort to mark the fiftieth anniversary of The Boston Consulting Group (BCG), we've gathered together 50 chapters on how to turn today's major challenges—many of which have been simmering for some time—into opportunities. This body of work is based not on ivory tower musings but on our close collaboration with clients across the private, public, and social sectors. BCG's guiding principle is “Shaping the Future. Together,” and the chapters in this book testify to this.

Week in, week out, BCG's 800 partners, operating in 16 practice areas, work with leaders and their organizations to develop new ideas, new insights, and new ways to win and own the future. From these experiences, we've created a large portfolio of publications and multimedia content. In 2012, we produced more than 300 reports, articles, videos, podcasts, and interactive graphics, all of which are readily available on bcgperspectives.com.

For Own the Future, we have pulled together what we think are the best winning moves for leaders and their organizations today: most of these have been developed over the past decade in partnership with our clients, but some are classics that have been developed over the past 50 years and that have stood the test of time.

This book is the third in a series we've produced with John Wiley & Sons, a global publishing house, on groundbreaking business ideas. The two previous volumes were compendiums of BCG writings on strategy going back to the 1960s. This new volume is more contemporary and forward-looking. It has been put together for a very different purpose: to help business leaders navigate their way through a period of accelerating change.

At the book's core is a manifesto for radical transformation—something that has been BCG's underlying mission since its founding 50 years ago. The firm was born in convulsive times: the 1960s were a time of social ferment. Today, the world stands at a new crossroads, facing social, political, and economic turmoil on an unprecedented scale. Everywhere you look, things are changing.

Two things in particular are happening. First, we are experiencing the most radical restructuring of the global economy since the Industrial Revolution, when the countries of Western Europe surpassed China and India—until then, the world's largest markets. This is a seismic and secular shift. Second, as this process unfolds (which may take several decades), we are encountering striking levels of turbulence and volatility.

BCG is at the forefront of efforts to understand this dual phenomenon—and to help organizations stay one step ahead. We have produced some pioneering work on the reshaping of the global economy. In 2008, we wrote Globality, which described the competition between everyone from everywhere for everything. Two years later, we wrote Accelerating out of the Great Recession, which emerged from our Collateral Damage project and explained the contours of a two-speed world. Most recently, we wrote The $10 Trillion Prize, which calculated the likely impact of 1 billion Chinese and Indian middle-class consumers on the world economy by 2020.

We have also led the way in understanding the unprecedented nature of the turbulent conditions confronting business leaders today. Research and analysis by our Strategy Institute have shown that turbulence is striking more frequently than in the past (more than half of the most turbulent quarters over the past 30 years have occurred during the past decade), increasing in intensity (volatility in revenue growth, in revenue ranking, and in operating margins have all more than doubled since the 1960s), and persisting much longer than in preceding periods (the average duration of periods of high turbulence has quadrupled over the past three decades).

Amid all this change, it is not clear where the world is heading over the next 50 years. But one thing is clear: the game is changing. The old ways are rapidly becoming outdated, obsolete. New opportunities are opening up. Some see this transitional period in a gloomy, pessimistic way. By contrast, we at BCG are profoundly positive about the future. As Hans-Paul Bürkner, BCG's chairman and former CEO, says in his chapter, “Strategic Optimism: How to Shape the Future in Times of Crisis” (Chapter 49), “The fundamental drivers of growth are stronger than they have been at any point in human history.”

But to capitalize on these trends, and to really own the future, leaders must be proactive. They must challenge the status quo. In short, they must change the game or risk going out of business. This is not the time to tinker with reform. This is a time for large-scale transformation. In convulsive times, the stakes are higher—and the consequences of success or failure are greater.

The book's chapters, some of which have been abridged from longer reports, are arranged along 10 dimensions—each one an attribute of outstanding organizations and their leaders. In an age of accelerating change, foremost among these attributes is the need to be adaptive. This capacity to change—and, in particular, to turn each new challenge into an opportunity—is the secret of the most successful game-changing organizations.

BCG has long extolled the virtues of adaptive approaches. Bruce Henderson, BCG's founder and the architect of modern corporate strategy, wrote extensively on what he called strategic and natural competition, drawing on ideas about evolution and adaptation from Charles Darwin. In this book, we republish some of our latest thinking on this attribute, which has been featured in Harvard Business Review.

It is clear that leaders and their companies need to be more adaptive than they have been before, given the pace of change and the volatility of today's business climate. And they must be more global too.

We've been advising companies on the challenges and opportunities of globalization since our earliest days. We were among the first to explain the significance of Japan's rise, we were the first multinational consulting company to be authorized to conduct business in mainland China when we established an office in Shanghai in 1993, and today we have more than 75 offices in more than 40 countries around the world.

This gives us a privileged vantage point on the fast-globalizing world. What are we seeing? New sources of growth are continually appearing in far-flung cities and rural areas around the world. Also, new competitors are appearing. These include those that, driven by the cutthroat approach that has emerged in the wake of the Great Recession, are moving into adjacent sectors, product lines, or services. They also include those that, based in the emerging markets, are aggressively pursuing accelerated global strategies. Almost every year since 2006, BCG has identified 100 such global challengers that are vying for international leadership in their industries. Given this new competitive intensity, the ability to innovate has become increasingly critical. At the same time, companies must know how to find the new centers of growth and how to deal with the new competitors, which can be allies as well as adversaries.

Another feature of today's business environment is its extraordinary connectivity, even hyperconnectivity. Digitization has played a part, and so too have the spectacular advances of engineering, which have bridged the seemingly unbridgeable. As a result, organizations now need to be connected in the broadest sense with employees, customers, suppliers, shareholders, and a wide range of stakeholders.

Also, organizations need to be sustainable, and not only in the sense that they must be mindful of the environment. Creating a sustainable “business model,” one that is built to last, is harder than ever. But there are organizations—we call them sustainability champions—that have found a way to square the circle: to do good and do well.

These four attributes—adaptable, global, connected, and sustainable—have come to the fore in this age of accelerating change. But although necessary, they are not sufficient to succeed. As well as these, organizations need to show what we call ambidexterity: an ability to be, on one hand, efficient and effective, and on the other hand, inventive and creative.

Let's take the...