Dear employer, during the last weeks I do is listen and read the phrase "the model is exhausted." Even the head of the Spanish businessmen in Cuevas, has said, and this is serious. If anything is exhausted, it means that there are no more, that is over. So what I wonder is, who is responsible for not having foreseen that the model was finished? Who is responsible for not having provided sufficient time for alternatives? In short, who is responsible for ...?

It probably all of us, society as a whole, but a little more proud those with short term results that gave them immediate returns failed to read the future that we came.

The phrase "model is out" made ​​me regain some of the contributions of those who call "gurus" and sometimes despise them for having given them this qualifier. The first is Charles Handy, who in 1994, ten years ago, in his book The empty raincoat: Making Sense of the future (The age of paradoja, apostrophe, 1996) talked of the sigmoid curve, ie, cycles of the curve, one that tells the life slowly began an experimental and vacillating, and then climb down. Handy but as we said, there is life beyond the curve, the secret of constant growth is to start a new curve before the first finishes. The place to start is before it reach the top, where there is still time, resources and energy. However, it seems clear that if it were not, because at that point all the messages we receive are all goes wonderfully, it would be folly to change when the recipes work well today. The real power for change comes only when we face the problems facing each other, as happens now. We had to be self-critical before - which is not well regarded - when we had not yet reached the top. Maybe we should be wrong, but no problem because we had known where we were. In any case, the discipline of the second curve praised Handy in 1994, requires that we not invented to life itself, because that would mean perpetuating the same curve. The second curve is always different, yet to be built on the first and emerges from it. The paradox of success, namely, that what brought us to where we are not kept, is a difficult lesson to learn.

The second contribution is to have recovered in CK Prahalad and Gary Hamel (HP) in 1995, when they published Competing for the Future (Compitiendo fear the future, Ariel, 1999). These authors, in an environment where quality management - always essential - it was about, they said we had to design the future of companies, companies interested in increasing the numerator of the ratio revenues / costs, since the margin of generation from cost reduction is limited, while the generation of net revenue increase from the result of innovation has no limits. According to them, anticipating the future of a sector is based on a deep understanding of technology trends, demographics, regulations and the lifestyle that can be used for modifying the rules of the sector and create a new competitive space. In short, to anticipate the future of a given sector must look beyond the sector, we look at society and we imagine what we can provide. As HP said the forecast of the future of a sector is the result of having the innocence of a child about what could happen and should be a deep and boundless curiosity on the part of entrepreneurs and executives, and d a willingness to speculate about matters in which it is not, at that time, an expert. The forecast is the result of eclecticism, the liberal use of analogy and metaphor, a spirit inherent contradiction of being led by more than the client of a true identification with the needs human.

The Handy HP and make clear that we must build a future and we must re-learn to unlearn, but we do at the wrong time.

Dear employer, being consistent with what I write, I share the view of Jordi Fortuny in DE last week when they claimed was present in the DURSI competitiveness pact. Imagining a new economic future for Catalonia and promoting R + I + and without the university is going nowhere. As Handy said, the second curve is always different, yet to be built on the first and emerges from it. If the model is exhausted, not reproduce his schemes. Do not be afraid to innovate.

Joseph Albet

Professor at ESADE

Director DIRECTORS ALBET BCN

jalbet@albetconsellersbcn.org