Have you spent much time thinking about what your company will be doing in 10 years? If not, you’re probably like a lot of people today—you can only seem to find time to think about today; the future is just too far off to worry about. However, in doing so, there’s a good chance that you’re putting yourself at a permanent disadvantage for the next five or 10 years.

Take the American auto industry, for instance. In 1994, in an article entitled “Competing for the Future” published in the Harvard Business Review, Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad explained why American automakers are having problems today. (Remember, at that time, American automakers were struggling to compete with relatively new Japanese automakers like Toyota and Honda that were beginning to dominate the American auto market.)

According to Hamel and Prahalad, “Detroit automakers are catching up with Japanese rivals on quality and cost. Supplier networks have been reconstituted, product-development processes redesigned, and manufacturing processes reengineered.” The article went on to note the basic flaw in Detroit’s thinking: “Catching up is not enough. In a survey taken at the end of the 1980s, nearly 80% of U.S. managers polled believed that quality would be a fundamental source of competitive advantage in the year 2000, but barely half of the Japanese agreed. Their primary goal was to create new products and businesses.”

The Japanese understood that competitive advantages would be different in the future. Detroit was playing catch-up, trying to copy what the Japanese automakers had already mastered and, in the process, forgot to think about innovating and developing new and desirable products for the future. Read today’s newspaper and you’ll find that while their products may be made better, the companies are barely surviving. People aren’t excited to buy their cars.

Preparing for the future should be an ongoing commitment for any company. One thing that NAED’s Eastern Regional Council is doing to help prepare for the future is putting together a report on what the electrical distributor of the future will look like—so as to ensure that distributor companies are changing and innovating with the times. The Council recognizes that the business climate of today will probably be completely different tomorrow. With energy price increases, employee shortages, global competition, and incredible technology changes, any company that is not thinking about and adapting to those changes probably won’t be in business tomorrow.

Naber is president of NAED and publisher of “TED” magazine. Reach him at 314-812-5312 or This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Reprinted with full permission of The Electrical Distributor Magazine  www.tedmag.com