Pivot to the Future: Discovering Value and Creating Growth in a Disrupted World

The proven, effective strategy for reinventing your business in the age of ever-present disruption

Disruption by digital technologies? That’s not a new story. But what is new is the ＂wise pivot,＂ a replicable strategy for harnessing disruption to survive, grow, and be relevant to the future. It’s a strategy for perpetual reinvention across the old, now, and new elements of any business.

Rapid recent advances in technology are forcing leaders in every business to rethink long-held beliefs about how to adapt to emerging technologies and new markets. What has become abundantly clear: in the digital age, conventional wisdom about business transformation no longer works, if it ever did.

Based on Accenture’s own experience of reinventing itself in the face of disruption, the company’s real world client work, and a rigorous two-year study of thousands of businesses across 30 industries, Pivot to the Future reveals methodical and bold moves for finding and releasing new sources of trapped value-unlocked by bridging the gap between what is technologically possible and how technologies are being used. The freed value enables companies to simultaneously reinvent their legacy, and current and new businesses.

Pivot to the Future is for leaders who seek to turn the existential threats of today and tomorrow into sustainable growth, with the courage to understand that a wise pivot strategy is not a one-time event, but a commitment to a future of perpetual reinvention, where one pivot is followed by the next and the next.

Omar Abbosh is group chief executive of Accenture’s Communications, Media & Technology operating group and is a member of Accenture’s Global Management Committee. He has served as the global client lead for leading multinational companies where he advised client executives on major strategic issues for their businesses. Mr. Abbosh joined Accenture in 1989 and became a partner in 1998. He holds a degree in electronic engineering from Cambridge University and a master’s degree in business administration from INSEAD.

Paul Nunes is the global managing director for thought leadership at Accenture Research and leads the company’s principle business research programs that shape its strategic vision. He is coauthor of three books, Big Bang Disruption: Strategy in the Age of Devastating Innovation (2014). He has written for MIT Sloan Management Review, Fast Company, Conference Board Review, The European Business Review, Rotman, Strategy and Leadership, and Wired. Nunes’ research findings have been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, USA Today, BusinessWeek.com, Forbes.com, Inc.com, CFO, CIO, CIO Insight, Los Angeles Times, and Chicago Tribune.

Larry Downes is an Internet industry analyst and author on developing business strategies in the age of disruptive innovation. He is the co-author of Big Bang Disruption and author of New York Timesbusiness best-seller, Unleashing the Killer App: Digital Strategies for Market Dominance, (1998) which was named by The Wall Street Journal as one of the five most important books ever published on business and technology. He is a columnist on innovation for both The WashingtonPost and Forbes and writes regularly for Harvard Business Review. Downes has held faculty appointments at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, Northwestern University School of Law, and the University of California-Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, where he was Associate Dean of the School of Information. Since 2014, he has served as project director at the Georgetown Center for Business and Public Policy.