Se il tuo futuro fosse di fianco a te?
For twenty years, management lived by a single conditioned reflex: when margins drop, cut. This was the dogma of "quarterlyitis" — a religion that worshipped efficiency, flexibility and leanness as absolute deities. It worked, of course. But today that script has turned into a self-sabotage manual.
Power isn't on the balance sheet — it's in the future
Behind the margin question there's always a question of vision, of pathways, of choices that are difficult and, for that very reason, meaningful.
For too long we've accepted standing at the bottom of the chain, taking the world as we were told it should be lived, without asking the questions that could change the fate of a business and of thousands of people.
If we keep producing for whoever tells us what to do, we can't innovate, nor can we bring to our ecosystem the kind of change, sometimes radical but necessary, that opens up new horizons. That model has broken, or it has to break.
Designing the future today means visualizing the ecosystem. It means understanding who actually moves the pieces, and where the new shockwaves are forming. The new global-chain scenario, described in the WEF's Global Value Chains Outlook 2026, speaks of structural volatility, of chains redesigned around resilience, optionality, and the capacity to orchestrate partners dynamically.
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Margins are a consequence of positioning.
If you're caught in the squeeze, with raw-material costs climbing and clients pushing prices down, efficiency becomes an alibi. The future is right next to you. You just have to want to see it.
Many SMEs look for the future in some new, far-off market. Often the workable future is already standing next to us: in a different phase of the same chain, in a service that today gets treated as a cost, in an integration role, in some part of the client relationship that today sits in someone else's hands.
The advantage no longer sits where costs are lowest, but where the ecosystem is most ready. The World Economic Forum describes value chains shifting away from pure efficiency logic toward adaptive networks, where what matters is the ability to react, reconfigure, and reallocate production and capabilities. In this context, anyone who remains just the lowest-cost supplier slides into the category of the replaceable.
Raising certain costs today is the most concrete way to buy rights on the future.
Today the most advanced supply chains are looking for suppliers who invest in capacity, not those who survive only by cutting. Capacity means three very operational things.
Capabilities: reading clients' signals of change, translating them into offer and positioning choices, and facilitating decision-making processes that hold margins and the future together.
Platforms: routines of listening, analysis and strategic dialogue that bring board, management and key partners around the same table.
Standards: governance principles, metrics and shared commitments that give continuity to choices over time, and open access to chains where strategic reliability and the ability to adapt are what count. The WEF report talks about ecosystems, future-ready talent, and the capacity to orchestrate partners as key factors for attracting investment within volatile global chains.
The cost that rises because you're investing in new strategic capabilities isn't the same as the cost that rises because you've lost bargaining power. In the first case you're expanding your ability to read your clients' future and to take part in the choices that redesign the chain. In the second, you're just absorbing decisions made by others.
The future, often, is a different role in the same chain you're in today: contributing earlier to the definition of requirements, integrating the analysis and coordination services that the client currently handles in-house, taking on a larger share of responsibility for the final outcome.
To do this, you have to accept that your P&L changes shape: more fixed costs in people who do sensemaking, design, and the governance of ecosystem relationships; fewer "variable" costs in last-minute scrambles, overtime, and tactical activities with low bargaining power. It's an intentional cost inflation, one that moves you from the bottom to the center of the decisions that matter.
This means that consulting has to change too. The job is to help organizations not with magic recipes, but by helping them read their own ecosystem, see where the future is already standing next to them, and choose which "good" costs to invest in today, in order to buy themselves rights on their tomorrow.
At TIPIC, we'd suggest bringing this question to your next board meeting: at which points in our ecosystem does it make sense to raise costs in order to design our future?