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When the Covid-19 pandemic struck some organizations were more vigilant and better prepared to absorb the shock and are emerging stronger. This article describes the best practices of these vigilant organizations that enabled them to be more adept at anticipating whatever surprises are coming next.

The article describes the four ways that vigilant firms are distinguished from their under-performing vulnerable rivals.

Vigilant firms practice: A strong commitment to processes that promote vigilance. 10;9;They invest in foresight activities. They deploy flexible and adaptive strategy-making processes. They coordinate and share information across organizational silos.

Vigilance is rewarded when an organization is able to move faster than rivals once the ambiguities shrouding the weak signals of potential threats or nascent opportunities are clarified.

The practices of the vigilant organizations enable them to be more adept at anticipating whatever surprises are coming next, a crucial capability in the current and post-covid era.

The case of Philips Lighting shows how management coped with the ambiguous but real threats and opportunities of a highly disruptive emerging technology using three insight-producing approaches: 10; 10;∙9; Probe and learn widely. 10;∙9; Explore creative hypotheses. 10;∙9; Develop multiple scenarios. 10;

The case shows how leadership teams can effectively respond when confronted with ambiguous but potentially disruptive signals.

When assessing a potential digital disruption, leaders can begin by probing the latent needs of current as well as potential customers more thoroughly. Once ‘probe and learn’ approaches have surfaced new perspectives and strategic possibilities, the organization should generate context-expanding hypotheses about the meaning and consequences of various weak signals.

A limited number of disparate scenarios, clearly organized around a few pivotal uncertainties, provide leaders with a strategic context for interpreting ambiguous signals.

In the current VUCA environmen, when turbulence is high or major disruption is feared, all leaders need to examine at least one scenario that directly challenges the organization’s current mindset.

The crippling lack of attention to potentially apocalyptic alerts also afflicts specific warnings about more common serious threats to the supply chain when there can be no certainty about their occurrence. Instead of mobilizing an organization to prepare for threats, inaction often prevails when leaders filter warning signals through eyes clouded by cataracts of self-deception, myopia and inertia. 10;

The corrective to the preparedness paradox: five attention-getting actions that prompt low-cost readiness for potential disruptions.

The route to preparedness starts when the leadership team is collectively curious about anomalies in the business market, emerging technology or social environment.

Pursuing the significance of an anomaly requires the exercise of curiosity.

The authors offer time-tested ways to improve an organization's attention to potential threats and new opportunities. Their recommended approaches include: learning from good and bad past experience, staying alert to anomalies, narrating credible stories about the future and creating engaging experiences through simulations.

The authors map out a work system that was key to Procter & Gamble transforming its innovation practices from a slow-paced, cautious incrementalism toward a leaner, more entrepreneurial model able to make bigger and riskier long-term bets.

Starting in 2016, P&G began “innovating how they innovated”, supported by a strong leadership commitment to working differently.

The newly envisioned future included P&G exploring many smaller scale innovations within and across business units, with quick learning, conducted in close collaboration with consumers and driven by their problems and needs.

Kathy Fish began this initiative by studying what innovation practices had produced “irresistible superiority” in the past.

Describes how P&G, a leading, long-established company instituted a systematic program of changing the system through which the work of innovation gets done. This system has eight action levers that collectively shape a supportive and productive work environment. Taking these actions in a coherent, coordinated fashion at Procter & Gamble, changed the operating environment and the company’s innovators adapted their behavior to the new system.

The attitudes and perceptions of New Zealanders toward current consumerism issues are outlined and compared with four other countries. Many of the opinions expressed are critical of the existing practices of business and appear to be common in the other four countries. The theory of consumer product life cycle suggesting the development of national consumer movements was not supported by the data obtained in New Zealand.

The purpose of this paper is to employ a quantitative approach to explore the intellectual structure of the market orientation (MO) field over the course of its development.

This research was conducted by using the bibliometric techniques of citation and co-citation analyses to investigate 1,892 publications in the MO field from 1990 to 2016, as well as factor analysis and multidimensional scaling to present a clear visual experience of the knowledge structure of the MO filed.

This study reveals meaningful outputs to assist in: delineating the critical authors, institutions and countries related to the study of MO; identifying the published documents that have had a significant influence on the field; clarifying the subfields that have developed from the MO field; and mapping the intellectual structure of the field in a two-dimensional space that allows for the visual representation of different themes.

Given the sheer volume of works that exist, these bibliometric techniques cannot completely measure, describe and present the entire intellectual structure of the MO field. Instead, co-citation analysis was performed using the data from only the top publications to identify the level of integration of the field, the changes of each knowledge group and the maturity of its evolution.

First, this study extends the approach to identify the subject of MO from a quantitative perspective. Second, our analysis shows the intersection between the marketing discipline and management discipline in the MO literature. Finally, this study reveals the development tendency of the MO field in recent years. The results of this study are valuable to readers interested in MO research, especially those newly interested in this field.

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