FOREWORD
6
FORTUNE.COM // NOVEMBER 2019
THE PRAGMATISTS among us will say that peering into the future is impos-
sible. They’ll say with a smirk that there are no crystal balls, no indelible
lines on human palms that foretell our destinies. The rest of us, and
I count myself among them, harbor at least some suspicion that such
precognition is possible. We believe that, indeed, there are some who can
predict what will happen tomorrow.
We call them prophets. Visionaries. Oracles. And often we find them
in the realm of business, one of the rare places where mortal beings can
actually create the future they’re envisioning.
Among the most remarkable of these builder-prophets is James Dyson,
profiled by Fortune senior writer Jeremy Kahn in this issue. Dyson’s
improbable bagless vacuum cleaners, impossible bladeless fans, and
hyperspeed hand dryers—all of which were figments of a Jetsons-like
age before Dyson dreamed them up—have made him a literal household
name in much of the world and turned the 72-year-old Briton into a
billionaire. But Dyson was hardly satisfied. His eyes, it seems, were so
firmly focused on the future that he committed some $2.5 billion and
four years of his life to an even more ambitious vision—building a high-
end electric vehicle that would go farther, ride sleeker, and be dramati-
cally more efficient than any other.
It ended up a bust. (For the incredible saga, please read “James Dyson’s
Electric Shock, on page 110.) As you’ll see, it wasn’t that Dyson couldn’t
build his magic machine, but rather that he couldn’t manufacture it
cheaply enough to make the business worthwhile. As Jeremy writes: “At
a time when every company speaks about innovation and disruption,
Dyson’s decision to kill his electric car is a case study in the delicate bal-
ancing act of embracing ingenuity while keeping an eye on profits.”
That balancing act between ambition and efficiency, between tomorrow’s
opportunity and today’s capacity, is also at the center of Fortune’s third
annual Future 50 list, developed with our partner Martin Reeves at BCG’s
Henderson Institute. We screened more than a thousand of the world’s
largest publicly traded companies on a number of factors that signal the
potential for long-term growth (please see the full package, including
our methodology, beginning on page 79). The aim: to find 50 companies
that can not only weather the future’s uncertainty, but also thrive in it.
No. 5 on our 2019 list is Spotify—the digital-music-streaming ser-
vice that now has 232 million monthly users and 108 million paying
subscribers globally. Readers are sure to have varying (and perhaps,
emotional) opinions about our story headline—“Spotify Saved the
Music Industry. Now What?”
(page 84)—but one thing is
clear: The company’s Swedish
creator, Daniel Ek, is someone
who clearly saw the future—
and seized it, as digital editor
Andrew Nusca reports.
Yet for all the advantage that
can be had in knowing what’s
to come, the most valuable
intuition is arguably the ability
to spot the dangers lying in
wait—at least in time to navigate
around them. One such terror,
as Jeffrey Ball reports in “Racing
a Rising Tide” (page 126), is cli-
mate change—and you may be
surprised by who’s sounding the
alarm (and how loud): the in-
surance industry. For the oracles
in this ancient, buttoned-down
trade, “global warming has ad-
vanced from a future ecological
challenge to a present financial
shock,” Jeff writes.
The most recent two-year
period (2017–2018) was the
most expensive on record for
the insurance industry in terms
of natural catastrophes. Ask the
CEO of Swiss Re, the world’s
largest reinsurer, what’s re-
sponsible for this shocking tab,
and he doesn’t pause: climate
change. And as one of that
company’s scientists told Jeff,
this might be “the problem that
humanity is not clever enough
to really tackle.”
Then again, there is one
hope: James Dyson needs a new
project.
CLIFTON LEAF
Editor-in-Chief, Fortune
@CliftonLeaf
F U TURE
SHOCK
