Future readiness is not a prediction game. It is a discipline. That is Howard Yu’s central message in a recent presentation to the Nordic Business Forum.
Howard Yu argues that tomorrow belongs to organisations that build habits, culture, and tiny daily moves that keep them fractionally ahead of today’s challenges.
Many companies swing wildly between moonshot innovation and defensive cost-cutting. That pendulum kills momentum. Future-ready organisations do both at once. They deliver now while building what comes next. Roche and Novartis mastered this over generations, reinventing themselves from dyes to drugs to genomics without ever pausing the core business.
The next requirement is cultural courage. Real transformation comes from a stream of experiments, most destined to fail. The test is simple: can your team say, “This is not working — stop it”? If speaking that truth feels dangerous, the culture is already stuck. The best organisations kill the average so the excellent can grow.
Yu’s third rule: become effortless to work with. Nvidia did not guard its advantage. It opened its tools, empowered others, and let an ecosystem form around it. In a connected world, enabling partners is a strategy, not charity.
Future readiness is also personal. Yu’s example of Tony — a junior engineer whose ignored side project became mission-critical during the pandemic — shows what happens when someone adds one new capability to their craft.
That is the plus-one mindset. In an AI era, expertise alone is not enough. Advantage comes from adding a fresh adjacent skill that changes what your expertise can do.
Future readiness is not about perfect plans or heroic leaps. It is showing up each day one inch better than yesterday. Those inches compound. That is how organisations evolve and leaders stay relevant.