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Howard Yu, Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD Business School, shares a simple but powerful idea: future-ready organizations are built by leaders who learn to perform today while transforming for tomorrow. Not later. Not after the next shutdown. Now.

For industrial and maintenance leaders, this tension is familiar. Every hour spent experimenting can feel like an hour taken away from uptime. Yet organizations that focus only on optimizing today quietly fall behind. The leaders who endure are those who do both.

Yu calls this discipline perform and transform. It means protecting today’s operations while deliberately building new capabilities alongside them. In maintenance, this might be a small pilot in predictive maintenance, a limited AI use case for work planning, or training one technician in data analysis while the rest of the team keeps production moving.

Another core lesson is ownership. Transformation is not a big program rolled out from above. It is a series of experiments. Some will work. Some won’t. Future-ready leaders make failure survivable and learning visible. They are also willing to stop what is merely “pretty good” to scale what is truly valuable. In maintenance, this can mean retiring legacy routines that feel safe but add little value and doubling down on practices that genuinely improve reliability or safety.

Yu also emphasizes ecosystem thinking. Strong organizations don’t try to do everything alone. They make themselves easy to work with. For maintenance leaders, this means reducing friction between operations, IT, OEMs, contractors, and partners. Learning speeds up when collaboration is simple.

Perhaps the most human insight is Yu’s reminder to “find your Tony”, the curious individual who steps forward without being asked. Often young, often unnoticed, and often closest to real work. Many maintenance breakthroughs don’t come from consultants, but from technicians who see problems every day and dare to suggest a better way.

Future readiness is not about giant leaps. It is about being one inch ahead. One process improved. One skill learned. One experiment launched. Over time, those inches add up.

Leadership in industry and maintenance has always been about responsibility. Today, it is also about readiness. 

Howard Yu

 

Howard Yu is the LEGO® Professor of Management and Innovation at IMD Business School and Director of IMD’s Center for Future Readiness. His research focuses on why some organizations adapt and grow while others fall behind. Working closely with industrial and technology-driven companies worldwide, Yu helps leaders turn strategy into everyday habits that keep organizations just one inch ahead.

 

Key takeaways for industrial & maintenance leaders

1. Perform and transform simultaneously. Protect today’s performance while intentionally building tomorrow’s capabilities.

2. Make learning faster than change. Encourage experimentation, stop low-value routines, and scale what works.

3. Progress beats perfection. One small step forward, taken consistently, builds future readiness.

 

Text: Mia Heiskanen   Photos: Pasi Salminen   Visual: Nordic Business Forum/Linda Saukko-Rantala