Importance of Critical Foresightedness in Business Management

Year 2011 was the time, when we saw the world’s leading web service providers??“Yahoo” get pinned down by its competitors. There were bunch of reasons to justify the fall of Yahoo from global markets and dominance; one of them was “Poor Futuristic Vision and Decisiveness”. It made it really hard to believe that the company who once had dominated the email services with a market capital of approximately $118 billion dollars during 1998-2004, failed to develop a successful strategic plan. More than the successful strategic plan, it was lack of “Critical Thinking as a part of Foresight Vision” that led to the collapse.

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Foresight Vision is the synthesis of intuition, innovation and execution that helps in the formation of a principle for the organization whereas Critical Thinking is a mindset of deliberately analyzing information?and formulating better judgements and decisions. It involves using things like logic, reasoning, and creativity, to draw conclusions and generally understand things better. It answers the question “How” and “When” of the business expansion but it does not answer the question, “What should we be doing and Why?” this is what Yahoo could not answer, thus, falling behind its competitors.

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Henry Mintzberg(1994), in an article titled “The Five Minds of a Manager”, states that These days, what managers desperately need is to stop and think—to step back and reflect thoughtfully on their experiences. Critical thinking requires creativity, innovation, research phase and its conclusion that helps in understanding the needs of our customers, involves the voice of its employees and best industry practices to ensure that all of this is linked when defining a successful strategy. Yahoo, failed to understand the changing needs of its customers and top management failed to acknowledge the emotional climate within the organization, were the other reason why Yahoo failed in web services industry.

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Comparing Yahoo and Google Mail Services Storage Limit:

Gmail

Gmail users were given 15GB of free storage capacity, which should be enough for most users.

On premium plans, we could pay for extra storage, $2 per month would get us 100GB, while for $300 per month we receive 30TBs.

Outgoing emails were limited to 50MB, although Google Drive was an option for files that exceed this amount.

Yahoo

Yahoo mail gave its users a whopping 1TB of free storage. It’s unlikely that we had need it more, but Yahoo didn’t provide any extra storage options.

?Even if we opted, 25MB was the maximum outgoing email size, although we could attach up to 100MB using the Large Files feature.

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Foresightedness is proactive and helps in defining competitive domain for corporate advantage and expansion. It uses external and internal data and a qualitative synthesis of perceptions and opinions. Futuristic Thinking helps in creating a strategy that is unifying, rational and involves integrative framework for decisions related to resource utilization and direction of business. Clarity in Vision adds value to the business, can help maximize resources and initiates positive changes.

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?The tech powerhouse Google Inc. is known for successful critical thinking, innovation and learning from past experiences. Google uses lifestyle strategy to sell potential employees on the ideas that they can work and have fun. Google has an office with slides leading to cafeteria, dog friendly offices, free –all –you – can – eat buffets and quirky seating including, bean bags, massage chairs, boating and ski gondolas.

Apart from this, Google gives time to its engineers to work on side projects, which results in innovative and creative ideas. Google with its foresightedness in tech came up with, synchronizing every web application with its user’s google account to keep track of their appealing content.

Thus, Google ensures to extract positive attention from its employees and customers, encourage its employees to think strategically and with vision in mind. Google focuses on what is possible for future, giving fair attention to how situations have been handled in past. With the help of Critical thinking, Google has been able to take advantage of new business opportunities and is continuing to do so!

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Being an opportunist matters a lot in Business strengthening. In 2002, Yahoo missed an opportunity to acquire a giant high-tech company, Google. ?Piper (2016) stated that at the time, Google’s co-founders asked only $3 billion, but Yahoo was reluctant to deal with the price, making Yahoo failed to own Google, which is now worth more than $500 million. However, Yahoo continued to grow in 2005 when it acquired many other companies and put its stake to 40% shares of Alibaba, the largest Chinese e - commerce (Jacques et al. 2013).

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The condition was again turned around in 2008 when Microsoft tried to acquire Yahoo for $44.6 billion.?Although Yahoo shareholders agreed with its acquisition by Microsoft, Yahoo CEO and Yahoo’s board did not, so the acquisition eventually did not take place Finally, Yahoo was acquired by Verizon, a US communication company, at only $4.83 billion in 2017. In 2021 Apollo Global Management acquired Verizon at $5 billion.

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The goal of Critical Thinking is to out – think, out – plan and out – manoeuver other competitors. Without comprehensive Critical Mindset, the organization risks making quick decisions that lack the creativity and insights derived through a Critical & long term evaluation process.

?To conclude the “Importance of Critical Foresightedness in Business Management”, by Victor Cherbuliez describes the role of a leader in Critical Foresightedness –

?“What helps luck is a habit of watching for opportunities, of having a patient but restless mind, of sacrificing one's ease or vanity, or uniting a love of detail to foresight, and of passing through hard times bravely and cheerfully.”