The future rarely fails for lack of ideas. It fails because nobody is willing to believe in them long enough.

The future rarely fails for lack of ideas.

It fails because nobody is willing to believe in them long enough.

I returned from the Rulebreaker Future Congress in Leipzig on Sunday evening. From now on, it is Back to the Future for me.

One observation has stayed with me ever since:

No real future began with a market. It began with people who believed in an idea long before others took it seriously.

Several of them were on stage. Six inspired me particularly: people working on things that would have sounded like science fiction just a few years ago:

• Hans Königsmann helped build reusable rockets at SpaceX.
• Hiroshi Ishiguro has been developing humanoid doubles for decades.
• Winfried Hensinger is working on quantum computers with a million qubits.
• Brett Kagan trains human brain cells as biological computers.
• Emil Kendziorra wants to buy people time by cryopreserving them.
• Marcus Gerhardt is bringing brain-computer interfaces into practice.

The technologies are fascinating. But the persistence behind them is even more so.

That may be the most important lesson about the future for businesses.

We often overestimate the technology and underestimate the persistence of the people behind it.

The question is not which technology will win.

The question is: What do we believe in so strongly today that we are willing to commit years to it?

Because the future does not emerge only once something works. It begins much earlier. Where conviction, capital, courage and persistence come together.

Those who remain in the here and now for too long, with existing customers, existing technologies, existing processes and existing markets, merely extend the status quo.

The future does not belong to those with the best ideas.

It belongs to those who hold on to them long enough.

#future #Strategy #Leadership #Transformation