Peter Compo
Peter Compo bridges the chasm between futurists and strategists that's paralyzed corporate planning for decades. With a PhD in chemical engineering, music background, and 25 years navigating DuPont's leadership ranks, he decoded why executives instinctively reject scenario planning—they mistakenly believe exploring multiple futures "lets teams off the hook" from execution accountability. His book "The Emergent Approach to Strategy" demolishes the false choice between three-day philosophical retreats and ignoring future uncertainty entirely. Compo's revelation reshapes strategic thinking: you get ONE strategy that must survive multiple plausible futures, not multiple strategies for each scenario. His 10-minute integration technique—adding "robustness to scenarios" as a fitness criterion on strategy matrices—makes future-proofing practical rather than theoretical. The mantra he inherited from an old engineer still guides his work: "never forecast an invention." Instead, he teaches leaders to overlay external uncertainties they can't control onto internal developments they influence, creating strategic clarity without prediction delusions. Compo's mission remains creating accessible strategy theory that actually works in boardrooms, not just academic journals.
