Gary Hamel on foresight, strategy and innovation

A quote that resonated:

The future is much more important than the new, the hip and the cool. The fashion and communications industries may rely on a constant feed of zeitgeisty whims, but product designers and strategists need to develop a deeper understanding of change. Our timeframes are too long and problems too complex for such fluff. Management thinker Gary Hamel frames foresight as being “prescient about the size and shape of tomorrow’s opportunities” by building an “assumption base about the future” based on “deep insights into the trends.” His advice that “strategy must be created from the future backwards, not the present forwards” also underlines the short-termism of much of today’s innovation activity which places too much emphasis on what consumers said last month.

From Core77