Survival Is Not Enough : Zooming, Evolution, and the Future of Your Company

by Seth Godin

• ISBN13: 9780743225717
• ISBN10: 0743225716
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-01-08
• Publisher: Free Press

Summary

It's come to this. All the confusion and chaos and change and turmoil in our working lives have finally tipped the balance. We now need a new way of doing business. Every generation sees a fundamental change in the way we organize to do work. From Frederick Taylor's classic Principles of Scientific Management (1914) to Henry Ford's assembly line, from The Organization Man (1956) to In Search of Excellence (1982), our businesses reflect the times in which we live. Survival Is Not Enough is the next big step. Most of us view change as a threat, and survival as the goal. Yet we work too hard to consider just getting by as our primary goal. In Survival Is Not Enough, bestselling author Seth Godin provides a groundbreaking new way to organize companies to thrive during times of change. It contains a simple yet revolutionary idea: We can evolve our companies the same way nature evolves a species. Darwin was right. Evolution is a fundamental force of nature, and Godin demonstrates how this force can be unleashed in any organization. The first step is to eliminate the anti-change reflex that's genetically coded into all of us. Once a company learns to "zoom" (embrace change without pain), it is much more likely to evolve. And a company that evolves can become ever more profitable. Whether the market is up or down, whether technology is hot or not, in all industries, from retail to tech to restaurants, the organic approach to organizations described in this book will always outperform the competition. As long as our world is unstable, evolving businesses will win.

Author Biography

Seth Godin, a renowned speaker and author, is a contributing editor to Fast Company. Unleashing the Ideavirus has been downloaded more than a million times, making it the most popular ebook ever. The Big Red Fez has been number one on the leading ebook bestseller list for more than sixteen weeks, and Permission Marketing -- one of Fortune's best business books -- spent four months on the Business Week bestseller list.

Table of Contents

Foreword	xv
Charles Darwin
Introduction: More Than Survival	1	(3)
The Paul Orfalea Story: A Process, Not a Plan	4	(2)
Survival Is Not Enough: The Summary	6	(3)
Change	9	(22)
Guillotine or Rack?	9	(2)
Frantic at Work?	11	(3)
Businesses That Don't Change Are in Danger	14	(1)
Change Is the New Normal	15	(3)
What Happens When the Jaguars Die?	18	(1)
The Problem with Factories	19	(2)
What's the Internet Got to Do with the Chaos?	21	(2)
Successful Businesses Hate Change	23	(2)
The Promise of Positive Feedback Loops and Runaway	25	(2)
Runway Can't Last Foreever---Nothing Does	27	(1)
The Best Form of Runaway Is the Least Obvious	28	(1)
The Evolution Alternative	29	(2)
What Every CEO Needs to Know About Evolution	31	(16)
Competition Drives Change	31	(1)
The Big Ideas	32	(1)
What's Meme?	33	(4)
Memes Are Not the Same As Genes	37	(1)
Periodicity in Memes	38	(2)
Genes versus Memes	40	(3)
Denying Evolution Doesn't Make It Go Away	43	(4)
Fear and Zooming	47	(12)
Four Reasons People Freeze in the Face of Change	47	(1)
The First Barrier to Change: Committees	48	(1)
The Second Barrier to Change: Critics	49	(3)
Market Leaders Are Afraid of Failing	52	(2)
Change Equals Death	54	(2)
Why Change Management Doesn't Work	56	(1)
The Way to Build an Organization That Can Embrace Change Is to Redefine Change	57	(2)
Do You Zoom?	59	(12)
Start Zooming Before the Crisis Comes	63	(1)
What About the Creative Corporation?	64	(1)
Zoom First and Ask Questions Later	65	(2)
Comparing Zooming to Re-engineering	67	(1)
Avoid the Dragon, Don't Slay It	68	(1)
Which Sort of Pain Are You Going to Feel?	69	(2)
Your Company Has mDNA	71	(30)
The Vocabulary of Genes and Memes in Nature and at Work	71	(2)
The Power of the Metaphor	73	(2)
Why Evolution Works	75	(2)
Companies Evolve	77	(2)
Evolution from the Ground Up	79	(3)
The Red Queen Goes to Work	82	(3)
One Good Reason That CEOs Reject Evolution as an Alternative---and Why They're Wrong	85	(3)
CEOs Enjoy Picking Lottery Numbers	88	(3)
Evolution at Wal-Mart	91	(2)
Natural Selection and Artificial Selection	93	(2)
Runaway Times Ten	95	(2)
Is Incremental Change Enough?	97	(4)
Winning Strategies, Getting Unstuck and Sex	101	(28)
Typing in France	101	(1)
The Winning Strategy	102	(5)
The Stuck Winning Strategy	107	(2)
Competent People Embrace the Current Winning Strategy	109	(2)
Piling On to the New Winning Strategy	111	(1)
Extinction as a Way of Life	112	(1)
Sexual Selection at Work	113	(4)
Six Ways Companies Can Use Signaling Strategies	117	(1)
Your Most Important Sex Is with Your Boss	118	(2)
Embracing New mDNA	120	(3)
Sex Is Important	123	(2)
Artificially Selecting the mDNA in Your Company (aka Firing People)	125	(2)
Choose Your Customers, Choose Your Future	127	(2)
Serfs, Farmers, Hunters and Wizards	129	(32)
The Danger of Role Models	129	(1)
Amazon Tweaks and Tests While Wal-Mart Struggles	130	(3)
Wizards, Hunters, Farmers and Serfs	133	(2)
The Life of a Serf	135	(1)
Why Do Companies Hire Serfs?	136	(1)
The End of the Serf Era	137	(1)
Transforming Serfs into Farmers	138	(2)
Let Some of the Serfs Work Somewhere Else	140	(2)
Farmers Know How to Tweak	142	(1)
Amazon Knows How to Farm	143	(1)
QVC Outfarms Amazon	144	(1)
Think Like a Waiter	145	(3)
Hunters Don't Own Land	148	(1)
AOL Knows How to Hunt	149	(1)
Fast Feedback Loops for Hunters	150	(2)
Plenty of Companies Have No Clue How to Hunt	152	(1)
Choose Your Employees, Choose Your Future	153	(1)
Wizards Invent	154	(1)
In Defense of Slack	155	(6)
The Basic Building Block Is People	161	(14)
It Starts and Ends with the Individual	161	(2)
Changing Your Personal mDNA: Bad News from My Sister	163	(2)
Find a Great Boss	165	(1)
If You Want the Soup, Order the Soup	166	(2)
Starting Down the Road to the Zooming Organization	168	(2)
The Best Way to Stop Your Company from Zooming	170	(1)
The Zooming Club	171	(1)
A Quick Lesson in Avoiding the Acquisition Trap	172	(3)
Why It Works Now: Fast Feedback and Cheap Projects	175	(22)
Fast Feedback Loops	175	(4)
The Power of the Obligating Question	179	(1)
Linux Is Cool---But It's Not What You Think	180	(2)
Technology and Fast Feedback Loops	182	(1)
I'll Know It When I See It---The Power of Prototypes	183	(2)
A Prototyping Pitfall	185	(2)
Data Is Not Information---Keeping the Promise of IT	187	(1)
Putting a Man on the Moon	188	(2)
A Broken Feedback Loop	190	(2)
Implementing Hotwash	192	(2)
Plan for Success . . . and Plan for Failure	194	(3)
Tactics for Accelerating Evolution	197	(32)
Cherish the Charrette	197	(1)
Animals Evolve on a Regular Schedule	198	(1)
Bring Back Model Years	199	(1)
Alternate the Teams that Work on New Models	200	(2)
Better Beats Perfect	202	(1)
Slow Down Is Not the Opposite of Hurry Up	202	(2)
What to Do If Your People Get Stuck	204	(2)
One Thing Worth Stealing from the Supermarket	206	(2)
The Eternal Web Page	208	(1)
Everybody Brainstorms	209	(1)
The Suggestion Box Is Not Dead	210	(1)
Take the Dumpster Test	211	(1)
Living with Broken Windows	212	(1)
Let's Test It!	213	(2)
Should There Be a Statute of Limitations on mDNA?	215	(2)
Does Chaos Outside Mean Chaos Inside?	217	(2)
Focus Is No Longer Sufficient	219	(2)
Bringing It All Together: Decision Time at Environmental Defense	221	(6)
The Uber Strategy?	227	(2)
The Important Questions	229	(10)
Why?	229	(1)
How do you respond to small, irrelevant changes?	229	(1)
How many people have to say ``yes'' to a significant change?	229	(1)
Do you have multiple projects in development that bet on conflicting sides of a possible outcome?	230	(1)
Are you building the five elements of an evolving organization?	230	(1)
Are you investing in techniques that encourage fast memetic evolution?	231	(1)
What does someone need to do to get fired?	231	(1)
Who are the three most powerful people standing between things that need to change and actual action by your company?	232	(1)
What if you fired those people?	232	(1)
What's your company's winning strategy?	232	(1)
Is each manager required to have her staff spend a portion of their time on creating the future?	232	(1)
Are you (personally) a serf, a farmer, a hunter or a wizard?	232	(1)
What about the people you work with every day?	232	(1)
If you quit your job today, could you get a decent job as a farmer or a hunter?	233	(1)
If you could hire anyone in the world to help your company, who would it be?	233	(1)
What's stopping you from hiring someone that good?	233	(1)
If an omniscient wizard walked into your offices and described the future and told you what to do to prepare for it, would your company be able to change in response to his vision?	233	(1)
How can your company dramatically lower the cost of launching a test?	233	(1)
Are there five areas in your company that would benefit from fast feedback loops?	234	(1)
Are you building all your systems around testing and ignorance?	234	(1)
Are you hiding from the market?	234	(1)
Have you ever tried sushi?	235	(1)
If you could acquire another company's mDNA, whose would you choose?	235	(1)
Why don't you do that?	235	(1)
Are the economies of scale really as big as you think they are?	235	(1)
Is this project going to benefit from the learning it creates?	235	(1)
In what markets could your marketing efforts enter runaway?	236	(1)
How much time does senior management spend with unhappy customers?	236	(1)
What do you do with complaint letters?	236	(1)
What are you measuring?	236	(1)
Are you being selfish with your personal mDNA?	236	(1)
Have you institutionalized the process of sharing what you learn?	237	(1)
Are you focusing too much?	237	(1)
Are you the first choice among job seekers who have the mDNA you seek?	238	(1)
Are you the first choice among employers that have the winning strategy you seek?	238	(1)
What do you need to do to become the first choice?	238	(1)
Do you zoom?	238	(1)
Glossary	239	(10)
Author's Note	249	(1)
More	250	(1)
Acknowledgments	251	(2)
Index	253