Lean into Tomorrow: Five Essentials for Future Success

You don’t need a DeLorean or TARDIS to travel to the future; the future is coming for you. Ken Moore wants you to be ready for it.

Moore is the Chief Innovation Officer at Mastercard. He sees five essentials you’ll need to succeed as the future unfolds.

First, lean into tomorrow. This is all about mindset. Fighting the future and clinging desperately to the past mean stagnation at best. Instead, organizations must embrace change. In fact, they need to go a step beyond and proactively invest now in emerging technologies and trends. Stagnation is a far bigger risk than taking a chance on the new; staying ahead absolutely requires continuous innovation and a forward-thinking approach.

Commit to ethics and building trust.Trust plays two roles as your future unfolds. As a leader, trust in you becomes your team’s anchor as the tides of change surge around them. Your authenticity keeps them focused and motivated. Trust extends beyond your workplace walls, though; it’s a critical currency for your brand reputation. Even as you build personal trust, your entire organization must nurture its own trust with customers and the public. Defining and holding fast to your ethics ensures this. In practice, this means not rushing the future—strive to implement tech advancements safely and responsibly.

With the ever-increasing pace of change, it’s impossible to tackle everything at once. Instead, focus and prioritize. Strategically select projects and tech that most closely align with your goals and ethics. If those items have a healthy dose of passion behind them, all the better. Be patient with everything else as they await their turn on the priority list.

Let’s revisit this statement from the paragraph above: “It’s impossible to tackle everything at once.” Even after prioritizing, you may not have the time, resources, or in-house knowledge to accomplish a goal. The simplest solution: leverage partnerships. The world is now too complex and fast-paced to succeed alone. Their PR aside, even the individualist entrepreneurs we adulate actually have teams of people making their success possible. Effective partnerships require flexibility, compromise, and innovation. Drop the ego and welcome collaboration, and you’ll co-create value far beyond any individual effort could.

Finally, be agile and digital. We can’t predict the future with complete accuracy. A healthy dose of resilience and agility will keep you on track toward your goals even as inevitable roadblocks disrupt your path. In fact, new digital tools—from automation to AI—can boost your agility and reduce your response time to those bumps in the road. In fact, the calm they provide might even help you see new opportunities as you emerge from each disruption.

These five essentials ultimately stem from three core leadership qualities: adaptability, collaboration, and ethics. Keep them all in mind, and you won’t just be ready for the future—you’ll be making it!

This article was adapted by Dan Mushalko from our podcast episode Mastercard’s Chief Innovation Officer on Fostering a Culture of Innovation.

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