Future Proof your business, Book Review
Review
Future-Proof your business (ISBN 978-0-241-44644-7), is book published by Penguin Business Experts in 2020 written Tom Cheesewright. I bought this book at Underthecovershop. Tom is a well-established and experienced business consultant, having worked for many years with global companies on their internal ability to look forward to the future. Working to give them the skills, tools and awareness needed to ensure their companies remain relevant and moving forward.
Core Messages
The key message in this book is to bring the awareness of the future and the importance of looking to the horizon is for any business of any size. You need to be consistently looking at yourself, your industry, your internal and external factors and seeing how things are right now, in the next few years and in the longer term. Ensuring that we are business owners and leaders don´t get operational blindness looking only at the next order, email, or event. With the daily work preventing us from having and creating a vision for our business for the future. The book provides some tools and anecdotes that communicate his thoughts in a conversational way that is very readable. This is considering the core message being directed at a specific audience.
Focus on big organizations.
Future-Proof your business, is clearly meant for larger companies, even to the point where he makes clear that most of the content is for a manager in a middle large company. Much of the terminology and relevance of the tools and systems presented as well as the benefit presented are aligned to larger organization’s that have the complexity of scale and size. As this is his premise and starting point most of the content doesn’t draw much value to the small business owner on the face of it. Additionally, the tools presented lend themselves to the context of corporation level organizations. The book itself is well presented and focused on some key tools and processes to help build a sense of future gazing within the responsible leaders in each business. With this clear starting point on mid to large businesses, it immediately makes the book less relevant to small business owners, as. Tom clearly states in his introduction, so it´s value to those audiences might be limited.
Valuable Message
While the focus of the books content might be focused on organizations and companies bigger than yours the key message of making sure your business is future proof. Taking time from your daily operations to actively plan the businesses short-, medium- and long-term challenges, tasks and objectives will always be valuable.
Making the task of looking outside of our right now is a difficult habit to develop for small and large business owners, alike.
While I can´t specifically recommend the book for its content to the usual small business owner as the references and overall target audience for this book is not them. The ideas and thoughts the book conveys is important to us all.
Key lessons
- Take time to plan, both the short (one year) medium (2-5 year) and Long-term outlooks.
- Look at your pressure points both internal and external.
o What influences my business and what is changing in that space?
- Make looking at your plan and pressure points a routine.
- Try to make it something you spend a day on every 6 months. Just to focus on the future.
If you have any questions about our review, or if you want help in discussing your company´s future, please reach out to us on Instagram (@department45.eu) or on our email at timh@department45.eu. We´d be thrilled to be part of your company’s future.
Thank you for your time.
Tim H.
THANK YOU!
