Book SummaryLead from the Future, by Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz

1-Page Summary1-Page Book Summary of Lead from the Future

In Lead from the Future, Mark W. Johnson and Josh Suskewicz offer business leaders a new mindset and strategic approach to promote the growth and relevance of their organizations far into the future. They argue that, as a business leader, you must develop a compelling future vision for your company and take the necessary steps to bring that vision to life. They show how “future-back thinking,” or what we’ll call visionary planning, lets you envision, plot, and take action to drastically improve your organization's chances of successful long-term growth.

Mark W. Johnson is a co-founder and senior partner at...

Lead from the Future Summary Why Use Visionary Planning

No one can predict the future. But the authors argue that, as a business leader, you can improve your organization's longevity, relevance, and growth in the long term. To do so, you must change your focus from short-term concerns and time horizons to the future you want to see five to 10 (or more) years out.

The authors explain that visionary planning allows you to respond to changing market realities by anticipating threats and opportunities on the horizon, thinking outside your company's established processes and approaches, reinventing your business or an aspect of it, and meeting unmet demands in the market with innovative products, services, and processes.

Additionally, the authors explain that the visionary planning approach can be applied to different types of organizations other than businesses, like governmental and activist organizations and religious institutions, to help them strengthen their relevance and influence in the long term.

(Shortform note: It's true that visionary planning can apply to different organizations, though [in sustainability and climate crisis planning, it's called...

Lead from the Future Summary The Three Stages of Visionary Planning

The authors break the visionary process into three stages: Creating the vision, converting the vision to strategy, and executing the visionary plan. They explain that they don’t intend for you to use these stages as a rigid checklist but instead as a flexible framework that you can adapt to your company’s unique context and challenges.

The stages of visionary planning work best as a collaborative process that includes regular, structured dialogues between senior leaders informed by the discovery cycle process. These discussions should emphasize exploration over finding consensus and making decisions. The dialogues should include people with diverse perspectives, relevant experience, and knowledge, including those who make resource allocation decisions.

(Shortform note: Collaborative, exploratory dialogues can be challenging when there are many people with different perspectives at the table. To overcome these difficulties, Kim Scott outlines seven key steps to successful team collaboration in Radical Candor: listening,...

Lead from the Future Summary Make the Visionary Planning Approach a Part of Your Organization

The authors emphasize that visionary planning is not just a process you go through once and then are done with. In order to ensure growth and relevance for your organization in the long run, you must make visionary planning a continued part of how the organization operates. To do so, you must elevate and encourage visionary mindsets and skills in your leaders (including yourself) and institutionalize visionary planning as part of your organization's processes.

(Shortform note: The authors of The Innovator’s DNA add that to embed a visionary and innovative mindset in your organization, you must also structure your teams in a way that helps team members develop and use the skills and mindset you wish to encourage. Team members’ skills should balance and complement each other—assess each member’s strengths and form your teams based on what each person brings to the table.)

The Visionary Mindset and Skills for Leaders

Leaders with a visionary mindset and skill set successfully implement the visionary...

Shortform Exercise: Imagine the Future of Your Organization

The first stage of the visionary planning process is to create your vision, which involves imagining what the future will look like and how your organization will fit into the future. The following exercise walks you through an abbreviated version of creating a vision that you can build a growth strategy around.

First, think about what the future likely holds for your organization's sector in five to 10 years. Are there any major shifts or disruptions on the horizon?