While other fashion brands raced to embrace digital strategies and aggressive growth, Hermès and LVMH chose ‘thoughtful expansion’ in 2024, prioritizing cultural relevance over rapid scaling up and demonstrating that, in luxury, slower can mean smarter. Both brands diversified away from China ahead of others while focusing on creating local relevance and redefining what the crucial luxury concepts of exclusivity and prestige mean.
By contrast, Nike fell from first to fourth place in the IMD Future Readiness Indicator rankings because it failed to strike the right balance between managing the present and looking ahead. In its rush to reinvent itself, it shifted its focus to online sales and began pulling back from traditional retail partnerships, leaving a vacuum that competitors were happy to fill.
The pattern of thoughtful restraint yielding superior results was also evident in pharmaceuticals, where Roche’s rise to the top spot in the IMD future-readiness rankings reflects a similar philosophy. While the industry buzzed with excitement over mRNA vaccines and quick wins, Roche maintained a balanced approach to innovation, avoiding the trap of over-promising on new technologies.
NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang has rewritten the Silicon Valley playbook of scaling up. His persistence with NVIDIA’s parallel computing platform and programming model CUDA – investing over $10bn and making it freely available – has positioned the company at the center of the AI revolution.
Future-ready companies don’t just chase easy growth and investor adoration. Instead, they think about hedging risk thoughtfully and developing deeper capabilities that will be necessary regardless what the world throws at them.
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