One of my favorite mentors, George Kozmetsky, co-founder of Teledyne and long time Dean of the Graduate School of Business at the University of Texas, loved to teach a principle he called "think backward while moving forward." He believed that all successful leaders had to have the ability to move far into the future to visualize the company's end game, and then travel back to the present seeing all the opportunities and obstacles along the way.

It sounds a little bit like time travel and that's exactly what it is. It's the Art of Timing. Modern leaders like Herb Kelleher of Southwest Airlines and Michael Dell of Dell, Inc. continuously "skirmish with the future" by visualizing possible future scenarios and their companies' response. It may seem a little complicated at first but it's not. Think about it as a three-step process:

1. What's Your End Game?
This is your company's vision. How is your company attempting to change the world? How are you trying to make the world a better place? The end game should be so far into the future as to be difficult to achieve but so inspiring that everyone in your company keeps trying. For instance, Grameen Bank is focused on getting rid of all poverty in thr world. This kind of end game moves you far into the future.

2. What Opportunities and Obstacles Exist?
This step is a journey from the future back to the present. As you make this journey, envision changes in technology, the world economy, the political scene, the competition, and other factors. Try to see how different routes from the end game to your current position might present advantages and obstacles. Companies like Shell map out three or four major routes in this way, trying to gain a feel for how the world might change in 30 to 50 years.

3. Define Your Competitive Space
Once you've taken your journeys to the future and back you'll have a good feel for which routes best suit your end game. By narrowing your focus down to a specific path or two you are defining your competitive space. For instance, biomedical engineering giant Medtronic only develops health devices that are implantable in the body because such devices require extremely high quality, which fits Medtronic's obsession with being the cream of the crop. Plus, they face less competition in this space since most companies cannot maintain such high quality control.