Look into the future before it is too late I admire the chief executive who once described his attitude to the quarterly earnings report to me like this: "We spend three days before and one day after getting busy - and then we go back to running the business as usual." As a recipe for a healthy medium-term approach to managing a company, this seems hard to beat - at least as long as quarterly or half-yearly results announcements are a necessary evil. Andrew Hill But leaders who are confident enough to raise their eyes above the inevitable daily pressures and short-term targets, also have to be able to scan the horizon, 10, 15 or even 25 years ahead. Indeed, it is precisely while chief executives feel confident - and enjoy the support of fickle shareholders - that they should be cultivating "an ability to sense the future," to quote S.D. Shibulal, new chief executive of India's Infosys. Mr Shibulai was speaking at last week's St Gallen Symposium in Switzerland, where the overarching topic was "facing risk" and the underlying preoccupation of business leaders was global political and economic uncertainty. How is this state of vigilance best achieved? The classic big company model is to delegate the blue-sky thinking to a unit at headquarters. Royal Dutch Shell's 15-person global business environment unit, which generously publishes summaries of its long-range scenarios, looks typical. GlaxoSmithKline operates a sort of think-tank looking at the scientific developments likely to shake Big Pharma, 15 or more years from now. Take it as read, by the way, that any industry with "Big" in its popular nickname - Big Oil, Big Auto, Big Pharma - needs to do some futurology as an antidote to the complacency that is a side-effect of elephantine corporate size. Both these arrangements are less traditional and, critically, less static and more open to external influence than they might look. The Shell unit, for example, is the core of an interactive network that, in constructing any one scenario, could build in the views of 150 operational specialists at the company and up to 250 outsiders. When the reports appear, the idea is that the main assumptions have already been communicated to, and discussed with, senior executives. At GSK, the think-tank is chaired by Moncef Slaoui, the group's well-regarded head of research and development. His horizon-scanners include internal and external experts. But he also has responsibility for weaving shorter-range developments into the business model. At Infosys, scenario planning is part of a five-year rolling prediction process. Its outlook is shorter-range than the pharmaceutical or energy industries, but then, as Mr Shibulal told me last week, "10 years is a long time in IT." There are other methods. GSK also makes venture capital investments - practical experiments that, in chief executive Sir Andrew Witty's words, act "as a pathfinder for where the main corporation might go." Companies could redeploy staff from the front-line to do some lateral thinking about coming challenges. They could pay a consultant to prepare a fat, expensive study. But scepticism about the value of such exercises is understandable. Rajiv Bajaj of Bajaj Auto told the conference that "if you have to put a lot of effort into merely detecting something, when will you have the time to go and fix it?" It's a fair point. But it is crucial to embed an awareness of long-term risks and opportunities in regular business thinking. Future scenarios can give senior executives what the Shell team calls "memories of the future," which will be triggered at the first sign of predicted changes. All these methods are worthless, however, without one critical final element: decisive leaders, prepared to risk unmooring their companies from the past in the interest of future survival. Short tenure, investor pressure and misshapen incentives are their enemies. But where an earnings "miss" knocks the shares, failure to act on long-range insights can wreck the company. Big Auto foresaw the US industry's collision with fate at least 10 years in advance but failed to take avoiding action. Eastman Kodak's predictions about the advance of digital photography were undermined by assumptions that the group could live off past analogue glories for a little longer. Fortune-telling is a thankless task. But unless boards act before insights crystallise into hard reality, I predict that even the cleverest forecasting unit will quickly become an "I-told-you-so" department, staffed by embittered Cassandras. andrew.hill@ft.com Andrew Hill blogs at www.ft.com/businessblog