If you want to know what your organization will look and feel like a year from now, you will need to plant your head ahead.
          We have all lived long enough to admit the future will not “happen” to us unless we give it direction. 
          Your organization should take the following three initiatives for you to savor the success of getting to your future before it happens.
          Your first initiative will take place on the left side of your neo-cortex.  It works this way.
          Every day you walk into work and see the same furniture in the same indentations in the carpet, the same coffee maker on the same faux-marble counter top, the same forms in the same “in” plastic putty-colored tray, the same “You’ve Got Mail” on your computer screen and the same faces popping up like prairie dogs within the same putty-colored maze of quasi-walls.
          Familiarity…your worst enemy.
          How can anyone get a new business strategy, product idea or irresistible service that will bloat your bank account over the next 12 months if you choose to be swallowed in sameness?
          I am not suggesting you change your décor (although…the lava lamp really should go!), but change the way you “see” your work.
          Look around, people like Madonna and companies like Apple just keep reinventing themselves. 
          Can anyone remember when Madonna was labeled a “one-hit wonder” who would obviously fade onto a torn and worn Trivial Pursuit card?  Is there anyone reading this who can remember in 1989 when Apple Computer was selling for $12.00 a share and Silicon Valley was toasting its demise?
          Clearing your organizational brain will require (1) a temporary suspension of judgmental statements (“that will never work, we tried it before and it was a miserable failure”) (2) encourage frontline staff who do the work to “play” with ideas and (3) allot time to sift through all the ideas to identify, as a team, the next IPod in your workplace.
          The second initiative will be the death-defying moment when, after you do your homework, you scream “ready-or-not here we come!”
          It has taken me 20 years of working with corporate America to figure out it is not the really smart people who make all the money; it is the really smart-risk-taking people.
          Risk greases the skids to greatness.
          You took a risk when you stepped into a slippery shower today, drove your car within 24 inches of some unnamed human being aiming his 3,000 pounds of polished metal at you going in the opposite direction, and kissed your child good-by who will enter an educational world beyond your control.
          Bryan Bowers, chief underwriting officer of the Centre Group, took the risk to provide insurance to a luxury ocean-liner condo project, a power plant in the Columbian rain forest and a steel-galvanizing plant in Estonia.  Last year his company grossed 882 million in revenue on assets of 7.6 billion dollars.
          Southwest Airlines, in 2004, took a risk on fuel options that have awarded them the least expensive airline per air-mile cost in the industry.
          In 1964, Thomas Watson Jr. took a gamble that his company, IBM, would inherit the future when he introduced System 360.  After 750 million in R&D and 4.5 billion in new factories, System 360 tripled IBM’s revenues to 7 billion dollars.  Remember IBM’s competitors at that time:  Burroughs, RCA and Sperry?
          Finally, check your GPS.  I am talking about your Growth Profit Strategy.
          Jack Stack, the guru of the “ownership culture,” calls this your “critical number.”  All of your goose-bump-laden creativity and bungee-jumping risk-taking will be a waste of your corporate time if you do not have a profit target.  This number is the altar to which that you continually lead your entire organization.
          Organizations that are not profitable are expendable.  This economy is not kind to just kindness.  You have to know (GPS) where you are on the road to profitability.
          The future will happen to your organization unless you make it happen…your way.  Plant your head ahead.