Twenty Years of Forward Thinking
September 23rd 2018 marks the twentieth anniversary of forward thinking inc. At the time, my idea was to do great work for great clients with great people, and that’s certainly turned out to be the case.
When thinking about setting the business up and having spent twenty years as a client in large global organisations, I was fixated on the idea of simplifying complexity. I had learned that you needed to say the same thing very loudly and very often inside a complex organisation for the message to get any traction. I knew from my own experience that attention spans are short, so the ambition was to help businesses to develop a clear strategy, articulate it very simply and engage the organisation around it. I used to call it an ‘organising intelligence’, with the strategy serving almost as a litmus paper that you could hold internal and external initiatives up against to test the fit. The approach seemed to catch the imagination of clients and we’ve employed the model ever since.
More recently, we’ve applied a particular focus to helping clients to develop their intangible assets. Those assets are primarily brand, human and relationship capital – the last one is the least understood and least proactively managed. Nearly every CEO or business head I speak with has the ambition of making their business more valuable. When another company buys them or an analyst values them, it’s the intangible assets which drive the valuation. Managed proactively, the strength of these assets can be developed and value increased, but it’s challenging because they are INTANGIBLE. It is far easier to focus on sales, cost management and acquisition, which are the areas which attract the majority of attention amongst the senior management team. Helping clients to grip and manage intangible asset development is a real focus for us today.
We understand the value of relationships and are very proud of some of the very long-term ones we’ve developed with companies like the BBC, CBRE, Herman Miller, Lendlease, BDP and many more. In the process, personal friendships have developed and we’d like to think that in some way our work has helped clients to develop their careers and experience as well as their business value.
Our team and the forward thinking alumni have developed considerably over the years and I hope that those who have worked or are working with us have found the experience a fun and rewarding one.
On to the next twenty years!
Chris Woolston, Chairman & Founder