How much time do you spend thinking about the future of your business?

Nice article in Wired this month.

According to Rajesh Chandy of the London Business School, research shows that the amount of time a CEO gives to thinking about the future is a pretty good indicator of how innovative and successful the company as a whole will be. And yet the same research found that the CEOs actually only spend 3% of their time on it. 

Two more interesting things:

CEOs whose first jobs were in marketing or R & D were more likely to give time to think about future customers, competitors and technologies relative to those of today, whereas those which backgrounds in other disciplines less so. (And I probably don't need to remind you how few CEOs come from a marketing background.)

Bill Gates used to have 'think weeks' twice in year, holed up in a log cabin, thinking about the future of Microsoft. Didn't do him any harm, did it?

So the moral of the story is... if you head up a company, and particularly if you're from an operations, financial or technology background (let's say), be sure to schedule in more thinking time - it's important.

And if you're an employee of a business whose CEO doesn't put his or her mind to thinking about the future (and/or presumably encouraging senior managers to do so), Rajesh has one piece of advice: "bail early"!