Write Down Five Years, Then Run One
Predict the world in five years in writing, then set hard one-year goals against it and measure them
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 4
- Confidence
- 90%
This is the method Schmidt teaches at Stanford and the antidote he offers to simplistic strategy rules. Rather than 'focus on what you're good at', write down explicitly what the world will look like in five years — how many companies will exist in your space, who will build the key technology, what the hardware and networks will be — then work back to what you will achieve in one year and run hard against that. Google paired it with OKRs: Larry Page wrote down every metric quarterly and graded teams on whether they hit 70% of his deliberately hard numbers.
Origin
Schmidt derived it from watching Intel sell off its ARM architecture fifteen years ago because it did not fit their simplification rule — a decision that locked them out of mobile forever because they had no model of what would matter in five years.
Core principles
- 01Simple rules like 'simplify the product line' are dangerous without a five-year model.
- 02Predictions must be written down, in specifics, so they can be argued with.
- 03One-year goals should be hard goals, not simple goals.
- 04You have to measure, or everyone looks good, claims a lot, and has no impact.
How to run it
- 1
Write the five-year world
Write down explicitly what your industry looks like in five years — how many players, what the technology does, what the hardware and networks are.
Pro tip Make each a concrete prediction ('will there be five AI companies or fifty thousand?') so you can be checked against it.
- 2
Argue about it
Have the discussion about what those predictions imply for what you should do now.
- 3
Set one-year hard goals
Work back to a direction and a set of things you will achieve within one year, stated as hard goals not comfortable ones.
Pro tip Google's business plan, written by a fellow named Salar, was in Schmidt's view the only corporate business plan ever written that turned out correct in hindsight.
- 4
Grade against written metrics
Use OKRs — write down every metric each quarter and grade whether teams landed above or below 70% of the number.
Pro tip Larry Page graded at the 70% line deliberately, so the targets stayed hard.
Watch out Without measurement, everyone feels good about themselves and nothing has impact.
In the wild
Intel followed the business-school rule to simplify product lines and sold the ARM RISC architecture because it was incompatible with their main chips — not realising battery power would matter as much as computing power for phones.
→ They were never a player in mobile; today Nvidia's B200 pairs GPUs with an ARM CPU, not an Intel one.
Asked to run his own method live, Schmidt predicted tens of thousands of AI companies and a personal polymath AI assistant guiding each person through information overload.
→ The prediction becomes a checkable artifact that a strategy discussion can be built on.
Common mistakes
Applying simplification rules without a model
Cutting the product line that does not fit today's architecture can amputate the exact capability the next platform requires, as Intel discovered with ARM.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and executives making irreversible platform or portfolio bets.
Not ideal for
Teams in a fast-moving pivot phase where a five-year horizon is pure fiction.
From the transcript
“the way I teach this is just write down what it'll look like in five years just try what will look like in five years…”
“try to figure out what the world looks like in five years and then try to figure out what you're going to do in one…”
“you have to measure to get things done in big Corporation otherwise everyone kind of looks good makes all sorts of claims feels good about…”
From the episode
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Eric Schmidt