"I never understood why so many people fear the future. I have never seen the future kill anyone. I have never seen the future steal from anyone. I have never seen anything that had happened in the future. The past is terrible, or worse, the present!" Millôr Fernandes

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Preparing for the future is a responsibility of leaderships that are diligent and committed to their organizations’ sustainability. The field of forces leaderships and the remaining members of the organizations have been facing is complex, at higher or lower degrees.

Let us look into the five forces:

AGILITY

• Opposing Forces. Preference for detailed analyses, search for general consensus, stakeholder alignment, protection of corporate image, and solid risk assessments.

• Driving Forces. Speed of business cycles, with reduced cycles in C-Suite leaderships, with volatility in the controlling interest itself, and arrival of new competitors outside the traditional sector spectrum, at times challenging the current business model logics.

TRIAL

• Opposing Forces. Preference for risk mitigation to the detriment of return maximization, low tolerance for errors, lack of incentives to entrepreneurship.

• Driving Forces. Need for diversification of concomitant stakes in fragmented innovation frontiers, with capacity to immediately identify failures, prizing go-the-market speed to the detriment of impeccable quality in the solution.

COLLABORATION

• Opposing Forces. Preference for control of the productive process, unilateral return maximization, search for immediate gains without coordination of long-term interests, technological secrets.

• Driving Forces. Decentralization of knowledge in independent ranges, connected opportunistically in the face of issues to be solved quickly, combining technologies, resources and capitals in fluid ecosystems that outweigh individual productivity.

MINIMALISM

• Opposing Forces. Preference for redundant structures to control processes, search for balance of internal powers, focus on segmentation for the analysis of risk vs. potential return.

• Driving Forces. New operational models based on the integration of networks around emerging opportunities, without the need to control physical assets, nor large groups of direct employees, with strong reduction of operational expenses and agency costs.

POIKILOTHERMIA

• Opposing Forces. Preference for the stability of the internal organism in the face of the hostile volatility of the external environment, continuous process improvement, custodial socialization of newcomers by veterans.

• Driving Forces. Need for external vision about the consumption journeys clients desire, customizing usage experiences based on technology, modular processes and capacity to adapt to the environment.

Such quantum electrodynamics defines the interaction of opposing and driving forces currently pervading organizational transformation journeys. It is up to the dominant and/or emerging leaderships to incorporate those new elements into the intricate social constructs that will define the capacity for organizational renovation.

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Daniel Augusto Motta é Managing Partner e CEO da BMI Blue Management Institute. Doutor em Economia pela USP, Mestre em Economia pela FGV-EAESP e Bacharel em Economia pela USP. É Alumni OPM Harvard Business School. Atua também como Managing Partner da corporate venture capital WhiteFox sediada em San Francisco (EUA) e como Senior Tupinambá Maverick na content tech Bossa.etc. Também atua como Diretor de Planejamento Estratégico da UNIBES e Membro do Conselho Deliberativo do MASP. Foi Membro-Fundador da Sociedade Brasileira de Finanças. Foi Professor nos MBAs da Fundação Dom Cabral, Insper, FGV, ESPM e PUC-SP. É autor de diversos artigos publicados por Valor Econômico, EXAME, VocêSA e Folha de São Paulo, e também tem três artigos publicados pela Harvard Business Review Brasil. É autor dos livros best-sellers A Liderança Essencial e Anthesis.

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