Our destiny is not written in the stars. What happens next—our future—is determined by our decisions, our choices, our actions. Shakespeare knew this four hundred years ago. We are masters of our own fate, he writes in Julius Caesar; our destiny is “not in our stars but in ourselves.”

Too often, however, we forget this. We allow ourselves to get overwhelmed by a sense of hopelessness. This is perhaps understandable in the current environment—amid regional wars, the lingering effects of a pandemic, environmental disasters, slow or negative economic growth, and high (albeit declining) inflation, the prevailing mood is one of pessimism, with some observers even saying we are enduring a period of polycrisis or even permacrisis.^[1]For example: Gordon Brown, Mohamed El-Erian, and Michael Spence, Permacrisis: A Plan to Fix a Fractured World (London, 2023).

But it’s a mistake to predict what the future will look like by extrapolating from current events. It’s better to stand back, consider the bigger picture, and take a long-term view.

This is certainly true in business. We know that with the right leadership, companies can break free from the constraints of their time, chart their own course, and deliver the kind of sustainable and profitable growth that sets them apart from the competition. While reversion to the mean is typical, even for most high-performing companies, some are able to buck the trend—as shown by a 2020 BCG study, which found that over the previous five years, “17% of top-quintile companies maintained their advantage and experienced minimal performance decay, even as their peers rapidly regressed to average.”^[2]Martin Reeves, Kevin Whitaker, and Tom Deegan, “Fighting the Gravity of Average Performance,” MIT Sloan Management Review, January 9, 2020.

So, as a business leader, you should be optimistic—believe that you really can navigate your way through these choppy waters and start visualizing what your company will look like in five or even ten years’ time. This vision should be viewed as a point on the horizon, a North Star. Then, you should prepare a roadmap containing the practical things your company must do to turn your vision into a reality. The cycle of continuous and rapid change will require your company to be constantly future-ready, able to move fast to recover from setbacks and exploit new opportunities.