Long Range Planning - Proactive Management

Proactive Management

As the experiences of the 1970s and 1980s showed, unpredictable changes can be very disorienting. These major changes, usually discontinuities referred to as fractures in the environment rather than trends, will largely determine the long-term future of the organization. They need to be handled, as opportunities, as positively as possible.

While horizons of many corporations have grown shorter, some industries still require long term decision-making by the nature of their work. Examples include energy companies which need to take a view about energy prices over two decades ahead in calculating the potential returns from investing in a new oil field, and the pharmaceutical industry where it can take up to fifteen years to bring a drug to market, requiring a view about what health service demand will be for such a treatment some twenty years hence, and whether governments will be likely to pay for it.

• "Proactive management is fundamental to leadership. Wow Take hold of the future or the future will take hold of you" Patrick Dixon author of Futurewise