Today’s CEOs and executives have enough worries dealing with difficult situations ranging from the global complex political context to the new disruptive technologies. But enterprises cannot just concentrate on today’s challenges; they also need to focus on how to deal with the future. It is important to start visualizing how competition will look like in the decade starting in 2020 and reflect on what the key success factors will be.

 The leading companies of today will not be the leaders of tomorrow. If we look at the top 10 global companies today, we will find that only two were leaders 10 years ago: Microsoft and Google. The rest have been taken over or sidelined by Chinese and American companies, the majority being technological ones of gigantic size and extremely complex and whose value exceeds one billion dollars. And probably in 10 years’ time, these leaders of today will no longer be leaders.

If we try to envision how competition is going to pan out in the next 10 years, we could predict five key success factors which shall be common in all sectors and geographies.

The first critical success factor is to dominate the new rules of the game. With the new technologies, the information on all companies is available to all and these companies will compete on who learns the fastest. The speed of learning will become a new competitive advantage and will be accelerated with the help of Artificial Intelligence, which, if used wisely, will facilitate the speed of learning.

The second critical success factor is designing “the organization of the future” capable of reinventing itself with an evolutionary business model and flexible and dynamic systems. In order to maximize the full benefits of the new technologies, business leaders need to create synergies between the technological and human. This does not only involve coming up with algorithms but ensuring that these help the workforce which will concentrate on verifying these algorithms and creating a hybrid organization made up of humans and machines.

The third success factor is to treat change as a continual process and not a one-off project every so many years. Experience shows that many change management projects fail because they are treated as a one-off activity and not a continual activity. Successful leaders believe that even if there is no compelling reason to change, one should change if for nothing else to keep instilling a sense of urgency and always finding better ways of doing things.

The fourth key success factor is diversity. Diversity is strongly linked to innovation and resiliency, both indispensable to lead in an environment of instability, uncertainties and market turbulence.

The fifth key success factor is to optimize both the economic and social values. Companies are being more and more scrutinized; new technologies create mistrust and consumers and shareholders will not trust those who will not take any responsibility for solving social problems. Leaders will tend to become more involved from both an economic and social standpoint emulating great industrialists of the past like Adriano Olivetti and others.

These critical success factors cannot be achieved in isolation by the enterprises but require efforts to be made by universities, technical institutes, governments, public sector and various sectorial associations all in synergy with enterprises.

Success will not consist of optimizing what we know already, but in preparing ourselves for what we do not know and anticipate future scenarios.

Ing. Micallef is a former CEO of Air Malta, Malta Communications Authority, Bermuda Regulatory Authority, Melita Cable, Malta Enterprise and various senior management positions with Orange France Telecom and Olivetti.