“Planned opportunism” is the author’s term for responding to an
unpredictable future by paying attention to weak signals—early evidence
of emerging trends from which it is possible to deduce important changes
in demography, technology, customer tastes and needs, and economic,
environmental, regulatory, and political forces. That attention gives
rise to fresh perspectives and nonlinear thinking, which help an
organization imagine and plan for various plausible futures. Planned
opportunism is a discipline that creates a “circulatory system” for new
ideas; develops the capacity to prioritize, investigate, and act on
those ideas; and builds an adaptive culture that embraces continual
change. Govindarajan illustrates his thesis with several compelling
company stories. For example, Tata Consultancy Services decided to
divest its fast-growing call-center operations at the height of the boom
in that business, because its leaders could see that technologies were
moving to the cloud and that global enterprises would eventually demand
higher-level, more strategic outsourced services. Call centers would
just get in the way of that future. And Hasbro, the toy and game maker,
acted on numerous technological and demographic shifts in the 1990s to
significantly outpace its leading competitor, Mattel. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]