In 2001, editors at Treasury & Risk wrote about enterprise risk management, despite the fact that only a handful of nonfinancial companies really had anything remotely close to a program in place. It didn't matter, because this holistic and quantitatively sophisticated approach to risk would ultimately prove critical to business growth and strategy. Today, there are many ideas in the same embryonic state that are destined to play a pivotal role over the next 15 years. So here are 15 of them–in no particular order–worth considering.

1. SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT: Effective supply chain management has proven elusive because, ironically, buyers and sellers within the chain see themselves as adversaries rather than appreciating a possible symbiotic relationship. Certainly, suppliers and customers can always be replaced, but that kind of attitude leads to disruption and unnecessary losses for both sides. Mutual interests govern healthy and efficient supply chains, and in the future the strategies that work best will be those that emphasize cost reduction for the supply chain as a whole, with a proportional division of the benefits. But Hobbes has not yet yielded to Locke-

although many of the vendors have caught on to the fact that for a supply chain to work, it will take willing cooperation not intimidation. Simply shifting costs to weaker players actually hurts overall financial efficiency. "The trend–and it will increase in the next 15 years-is to look more holistically at supply chains and find real ways to cut costs, not just shift them," observes Steven Bennett, head of supply chain business for NAFTA countries at HSBC Corp.