Written by Benita Dreesen | 28 September 2010

It doesn’t take a genius to see we are living in turbulent times. The power of anticipation is a skill that all of us have, but only a very few of us supply. However if you are looking for the top in life, for something that helps you win your business, helps you to go to the next level, to grow, to expand, to have a competitive advantage in business, you need to adopt this new lifestyle.

Why?

The power to anticipate is the power to shape the direction of your life and your company. Anticipation could be the ultimate advantage. Because it comes down to the ability of solving problems. And of how quickly and elegant you can do it. Most often we are in reaction to a problem; we try to solve it, we feel stressed. Today the leaders in industry, the leaders in politics are…: the people who anticipate a problem before it even shows up. And they solve it before it even happens.

What do you do when you anticipate? You utilize the capacity to step beyond the present moment and utilize the future as your leverage. The people in our society that were able to anticipate certain trends, are the people that are the best in the world in what they do, and they are incredibly successful. History is full of examples of people who developed empires by anticipating.

Trends and environments change constantly. If you want to be sure that the value of your company goes up, add value to it by anticipating. The thing that values most is anticipating your clients’ needs. If you don’t add more value, don’t be surprised that you are out of business at a certain moment.

A time ago, an article in Forbes magazine wrote about a discussion between some employees of a Fortune 500 company who lost their job, and their CEO. One man said “how comes that I was one of your best sales people yesterday and you let me go today?” The CEO answered “it is not that you are not worthwhile but you must know that, what you are doing today is no longer competitive. We can’t live on yesterday’s standards and expect to be the winner today. We have to anticipate what will be the standards of tomorrow and how we create for ourselves those standards right now. That’s how we will win the game on competition.

If we meet people’s needs, they are going to be fulfilled, they are going to strengthen our relationships with them, we are going to add more value and we are going to succeed. This is one of the simplest secrets of business and we have to apply them daily. Anticipation is not just intuition; it is a skill, a process.