What picture comes to your mind at the mention of bold business?

A billion-dollar unicorn?

A disruptive social impact model?

A business with a history of ruthless takeover?

The recent emergence of Chat GPT paints a perfect image of a bold business – a product model that disrupted Google’s decades-long dominance of search. Suddenly, Google is scampering in an industry it curated, owned, and controlled. Today, Chat GPT is about to make Google the No 2 in an industry it standardised and dominated.

Looking at various businesses and models, from Tesla to Space X, Meta, and even Chat GPT, bold businesses have something in common: they shoot for the moon or set their sights on things just beyond their immediate reach – like upsetting the industry leader, doubling or tripling their revenue year over year, disrupting a well-established model, or even offer their employees the option to work 100% remotely.

As entrepreneurs and enthusiasts, we often wonder how we can go bolder and make a loud statement, however, only a few businesses make that move. What does bold business means, and how do you become bold?

A bold business is built on a foundation of authenticity, courage, competence, integrity, and community. Boldness is built on the understanding that a future exists for the product you’re curating or the business you’re building. That is why future casting is a field every business leader of the future must master in order to be relevant in the scheme of things.

The key to being bold in business lies almost completely in strategic decision-making. In a rapidly changing world, making strategic decisions would be easier if you could know what comes next, and that’s where bold businesses draw their inspiration from – building a competitive advantage based on future opportunities, and not on predictions from the past.

We might not be able to accurately predict the course of the future but it is possible to prepare for the likeliest scenarios. Armed with that, businesses can boldly plunge into the future.

That is future casting – a reliable method to envision the future and establish long-term strategies; changing position, and the game from reactive to proactive.

As Ferris Bueller said, The meek get pinched, the bold survive.