We wrote Shift Ahead to document how the smartest companies and organizations shift their strategiesin order to stay relevant in the face of swift and exponential changes in everything from technology tothe forces of globalization, from politics and culture, from consumer tastes to human behavior. Wewanted to find out how they shift ahead – how they stayed ahead of the curve, the competition, and theevolving requirements of their customers – given the barrage of evolving challenges.

Isn’t it obvious to an organization when a promise is becoming less meaningful to consumers? Couldn’t those organizations that did not successfully shift ahead see that consumers were losing interest? Sure, on Monday night everyone’s a professional quarterback and can tell you which of Sunday’s football plays were foolish, or made for the turning point in the game. Hindsight is always twenty-twenty. It’s foresight, seeing the red flags in advance of the risks, that makes the difference on the road to success. And, so before we get to anything else associated with the process of being able to shift ahead, we get to the red flags.