I have known Vivek Ranadivé for many years and I trust his uncanny ability to “out vision” the visionaries. He typifies the kind of business partner that a company needs to break new ground. Vivek’s first book – The Power of Now – was a revolutionary challenge to leaders around the world to use “real-time” data to make decisions.

Becoming a real-time business, Vivek believed, would enable companies to be more agile and nimble and allow them to define markets and shape industries. At Atos Origin, we continue to believe in the notion of real-time as an integral part of the sustainable IT solutions we deliver to our customers. But the core challenges facing all companies continue to grow, such as maintaining customer loyalty, anticipating market trends, avoiding competitive pitfalls, identifying new markets early, to name but a few. Dealing with these challenges is going to require foresight and a precise understanding of business complexities before they fully materialize. Otherwise, the implications on an organization’s competitive position may be devastating.

In The Power to Predict, Vivek has leapfrogged business strategists once again with a compelling yet uniquely simple approach to success – anticipating business opportunities and problems so a company may act preemptively. Vivek’s vision is that companies can combine knowledge of past events, incidences and market trends with activities occurring in the now to accurately and consistently predict their own futures. In other words, companies, with the right tools, can literally “see around the corner.”

Imagine the power of being able to customize your products or services to meet demands as they are emerging, or to avert a service outage by recognizing and responding early to problems accumulating in your supply chain. We don’t know what challenges and opportunities we will need to navigate through in the future, but staying one step ahead on an ongoing basis is clearly advantageous in today’s highly competitive global markets.

The elegance of Vivek’s Predictive Business idea is that it allows executives to use the knowledge they have already, combined with real-time decision analysis of current business activities, to forecast and seize market opportunities early with greater confidence. Even more compelling is that it is applicable to every market and every industry.

Business executives who fail to pay attention to what The Power to Predict has to say are helping their competitors more than they will ever know.