Great Strategy Means Working on Now and Next at the Same Time

I recently sat down with a CEO who had been in the role for about 18 months. With a weary shake of his head, he confided that he’d been having a tough time. “There’s so much turbulence, so much volatility. And right now, there’s only so much I can do with the hand that’s been dealt to me.”

He wasn’t just struggling to cope with economic shifts or political uncertainty. He was paying the price for short-term decisions that had been made by his predecessor. The legacy of commitments, initiatives, and investments—or the lack thereof—was handicapping his ability to get the right strategy in place for future growth.

“What we really need to do is build a time machine,” he smiled ruefully. “Then I could use it to go back in time seven years and build us a credible e-commerce platform…”

Guessing that he didn’t actually have any time machines on his product roadmap, we turned the conversation to moves he could make in the present. That old Chinese proverb had it right: “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second-best time is today.”

Timing is Everything

Our conversation highlighted something crucial about business. Strategy isn’t just about what you do—it’s about when you do it. In business as in life, the decisions you make today will determine the constraints and opportunities you face in the future. If you fail to think far enough ahead, you may find yourself trapped by past choices with no easy way out. And if you think too far out, you might run aground before you get there.

Whenever you start thinking about your strategy, the first question should always be “When?” The time horizon you’re planning for will play an outsized influence on the questions you should be asking, the process you should be using, and even who you should be partnering with. And if you can find the clear thread that connects your long-term vision to what you’re doing today, you’ll reduce the chances of waking up in a few years looking for a time machine.

Different Timelines, Different Strategies

Sometimes leaders need to focus on the Now. They need to come up with plans to address shorter-term goals over the next 18 months. Maybe they’re bleeding cash. Maybe they need to complete a difficult merger. Maybe there’s an immediate threat that demands action. During the pandemic, every retailer needed to stay focused on keeping their teams safe and keeping the doors open. Consumer packaged goods companies just needed to keep the shelves stocked. That kind of extreme focus can be incredibly motivating for crack operators.

When your timeline is short, you shouldn’t have to look too far to figure out a plan. Usually, today’s answers can be found inside your company, in underutilized assets, untapped expertise, or underleveraged ideas. That’s where legacy management consultants like McKinsey and Bain often excel—much of their value lies in helping companies extract value from what already exists. It’s why people joke that a consultant is someone who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is.

Other times, leaders need to focus on how they can compete over a slightly longer horizon—say three to four years. Maybe they see fundamental shifts in their core business. Maybe new entrants are emerging. Maybe customer behavior is rapidly evolving. Right now, the rise of AI is forcing every leader to rethink how they do business.

When you start looking three or four years out, it’s a good idea to get beyond your walls. The best ideas may not exist with you, but they might exist with your largest customers; or even your competitors. That’s when professional conferences and industry experts can be invaluable. They can help you benchmark best practices across your industry and figure out a plan for becoming best-in-class.

Of course, a longer timeline of five to seven years is when leaders either set their companies up for sustainable growth or risk making themselves irrelevant. Maybe their core customers are going away. Maybe their business is getting disintermediated. Maybe artificial intelligence will do more than increase their employees’ productivity. At that timescale, maybe AI will make their company irrelevant.

The answers to navigating long-term disruption rarely exist in your company today. And they usually don’t exist in your industry. They exist at the periphery of markets, in emerging customer behaviors, technological shifts, and in competitors whom you may not consider to be competitors today. More often than not, the best ideas for long-term growth don’t exist yet. They’re waiting for someone to make them up.

If you’re a health insurance company, you shouldn’t just be benchmarking what Humana or Aetna are doing. You should be looking at what Google and Amazon are doing, too. You should be exploring customer segments and geographies that might not have been on your radar. And you need to be looking for macro forces—the tectonic cultural, economic, and consumer shifts that may be small today, but which could be game-changing in seven years’ time.

That’s where businesses should be working with forward-thinking strategy partners that specialize in identifying disruptive forces and turning them into opportunities.

The Future Shapes the Present

Of course, the biggest mistake that leaders can make when thinking about their strategy is to treat those different time horizons as disconnected. Too many leaders spend all of their attention on what’s happening right now in the belief that they can think about the future later in a separate exercise.

That kind of disjointed decision-making takes a toll that adds up over time. A strategy that works well to dig your business out of a cash crisis can also leave you in a worse position to fight direct competitors over the next three years and poorly placed to navigate macro trends in seven years. The key is to design a strategy that addresses near-term concerns, while simultaneously laying the groundwork for long-term success. You have to build a path from the Now to the Next.

Tesla offers an example of how to unify short-term steps with long-term strategy. Right now, you can lease a 2025 Tesla Model Y for an insanely low price of $199 a month. It comes with one crucial caveat, though: unlike with standard deals, you have to return the car at the end of this lease.

In offering these temptingly low rates, Tesla is solving a short-term problem of generating income from its cars. But its initiative is also designed to serve a long-term strategy. Tesla envisions a world where individual car ownership is a thing of the past. The company has decided that its long-term future lies in running a fleet of autonomous robotaxis. Every Model Y that’s returned at the end of its lease is one more vehicle for that fleet. In essence, people who lease a car today are helping to buy Tesla a fleet for tomorrow. It’s a beautiful strategy. Ironically, the biggest threat to that plan is the immediate plunge in demand caused by the political activity and abhorrent behavior of the company’s founder.

Portfolios, Not Pipelines

To successfully integrate short- and long-term strategies, companies need to shift from a pipeline mindset to a portfolio mindset.

A pipeline approach views strategy as a linear sequence: first fix today’s problems, and then look at tomorrow. By contrast, a portfolio approach recognizes that businesses need to invest in multiple time horizons at once.

There are probably things you can do right now to harvest the best ideas that you have internally. And there are things you can do to benchmark competitors to ensure you’re keeping pace with the industry. But everything should start with a future-focused strategy that runs through those initiatives.

In the early 2000s, General Electric realized it had a huge opportunity in building renewable energy infrastructure. It launched a program called Ecoimagination. The initiative started by looking inside the company to find “green” examples that GE was already doing. Then, the team widened its lens to see what it could learn from other heavy industrial companies. Inspired by a similar program at Danaher Corporation, it set up its Imagination Breakthrough program to fund the best internal ideas. These steps drove growth in the short-to-medium term while setting it up to succeed in its longer-term goal. By 2020, GE had become the largest installer of wind turbines in the world.

The lesson is that you have to start making moves today to ensure your business is prepared for technological or market shifts in the future—even if those shifts seem rather far off. The alternative is to focus on the here and now, and leave your successor wishing for a time machine.