Designing futures

Under the beach umbrella the thought arrives on schedule: walk away from it all. In advanced markets, 70-80% of companies put up for sale never sell, owing to key-person dependence. Prepare it for sale for real: it is the same work required to keep it and unplug.

The best young people leave bored, while the talent we hunt for outside already sits at our tables, used at half capacity. The labor market has little to do with it. It is a matter of organizational design, and the organization remains the one machine nobody designs.

A few people carry the company’s critical workings. Concentration starts as efficiency and turns into risk when a key person stops. Being prepared means knowing the real structure of the organization, beyond the org chart.

86% of B2B purchases stall during the process and 81% of buyers end up dissatisfied even when they sign. Buyers ask for the ability to anticipate, yet most companies mainly know the product they sell. Few know the customer’s strategy, and when it shifts, renewals bring surprises.

80% of board members report boards bogged down in operations. Strategic questions stay off the agenda and decision debt piles up in silence. Companies that decide within 48 hours grow 2.5 times faster than competitors.

Salone 2026 closed at 316,342 visitors, up 4.5%. Those who actually lived the fair saw empty B2B lounges and a Fuorisalone ruled by fashion and automotive. Three weak signals are already shaping a different Design Week: districts, premium, AI. Four scenarios to reason about the future.

The furniture sector has been standing still for five years and US exports collapsed by 28.5%. Caution has turned into paralysis, while someone else designs the market in your place. The next evolutionary leap lies in the supply-chain pacts nobody is signing yet.

72% of a CEO’s time ends up in meetings, 21% goes to strategy. The gap between what the company needs and what the top actually does costs up to 20% of productivity. Meanwhile the question stays open: who designs the future?

Companies grow by addition: products, markets, people. The organization stays the one from when the business was smaller, and every new industrial plan pours into a container that cannot hold it. The organization of the future must be designed.

Corporate history is the most solid item on the balance sheet and the most misunderstood: an enormous asset treated like a painting on the boardroom wall. Legacy is a strategic dataset, and those who read it that way decide better than those who merely tell it.

The Global Value Chains Outlook 2026 read at Italian scale, 50-200 million euros in revenue. The rules of the playing field are being rewritten, and every growth decision is already a supply-chain decision. Better to know before signing it.

For twenty years the conditioned reflex was one: margins drop, cut. Quarterlyitis worked, and today that script is a perfect self-sabotage manual. The future might be standing right next to you, in the supply chain nobody watches.