I’ll never forget my 25th Harvard Business School reunion, when Professor Howard Stevenson gave a lecture titled “Make Your Own Luck.” To a packed room he revealed this truth: If you want big success, build a business that responds to big trends. When he prompted us, the audience volunteered the biggest ones in the world: China’s growth, resource scarcity, and climate change. Then there was dead silence. Were any of our organizational strategies based on those?
A version of this article appeared in the May 2014 issue of Harvard Business Review.