The CEO of 2022 will have to manage a complex business of far-flung inputs, from customers' and employees' tweets (or the 2022 equivalent) to all kinds of data persistently emitted from billions of phones, sensors, and other connected machines. Companies that can manage and mine all those bits and bytes stand to make a killing.
Those who ignore information, especially voices coming over the social-media transom, do so at their peril, says Jose Lozano, vice chair of the Hispanic news company ImpreMedia: "Companies that aren't proactive will be at a competitive disadvantage."
If the winning companies of the future will depend on young, tech-savvy, somewhat impertinent information junkies, the U.S. will still rule. Youth is a scarce commodity in Western Europe, Japan, and Russia. So, too, with China, where a population decline expected to kick in after 2020 means a surge of retirees without enough workers to support them. Nor are those countries immune from social unrest, fueled in part by government corruption that threatens to hold back long-term economic growth. America's political and economic systems, on the other hand, are remarkably resilient. "There are challenges to be sure, but in the context of what other countries are facing, ours are ones that can be met," says FTI's Nolan.
What worries forecasters most are the black swans -- looming, below-the-surface dangers with the power to devastate nations or plunge countries into war. The bad state actors of today -- Iran, North Korea -- will still flex their muscles, but analysts also fear rogue terrorists who won't hesitate to deploy a nuclear or chemical device on a major city. Cyberattacks that bring down governments are also a worry.
Cybercrime certainly is the biggest security issue corporations will face in 2022. Today an army of hackers in China routinely scour the networks of U.S. corporations in search of intellectual property and trade secrets, says Kevin Mandia, CEO of security firm Mandiant. He adds, "My biggest fear is that in 10 years China will be making everything we were making -- for half the price -- because they've stolen all our innovations."
If Mandia is right, the innovators of tomorrow will have to work that much harder to stay a few steps ahead of the copycats. Like Apple (AAPL), DARPA, and others, they'll have to invent products and services that are so coveted that few will want to buy a knockoff. In other words, they'll have to invent the future.
