You must make a decision, and move.
GO NUTS!
By this point you should have a fairly good idea what is working and what is not. If you have been continually taking action, observing the results and taking new action based on that feedback, you are ready to make a decision and bet the bank on it. Seriously. There comes a time when your little experiments need to become full-scale attacks.
Whether you choose to do this through rapid evolutions or full-scale revolution is up to you. Either way, this rapid, fullblown effort is the only way change happens.
Bain & Co conducted a study of twenty-one recent 'corporate transformations' (large-scale management consulting projects involving massive company overhaul, mostly the CEO firing all of upper management). In every case where the transformations led to positive benefits for the company, the changes happened in two years or less. For the companies that changed fast and enjoyed quick and tangible results, their stock prices rose on average 250 per cent a year as they revived.4
This kind of commitment creates energy. And energy is what we need. Apathetic staff are worse than angry staff. Angry staff can have their energy redirected when an organisation is ready to move in a positive new direction. Apathy is far harder to budge. Consider from the same study quoted above that 90 per cent of people with heart problems that required invasive heart surgery never change their behaviour post surgery, even though it is likely to kill them. The same lazy habits that got them into this mess are likely to keep them in this mess.
IBM have not treated their reinvention as a global services company lightly. They actually sold an important part of their hardware business – their entire PC division, including the ThinkPad laptops – to Lenovo in China. Although IBM continues to manufacture mainframe computers (the latest is the Enterprise z9), jettisoning the part of the brand that had become most familiar to ordinary consumers was not a half measure. Of US$91.4 billion in 2006 revenues, IBM got US$20 billion from its Systems and Technology division, which manufactures mainframe computers and designs server processors and computer chips, and US$47 billion from Services. Who knows, maybe one day Apple will execute a similar flip and become a full-scale music business.
Business is no different from a kindergarten playground. In order to progress along the monkey bars you need to let go.
RAPIDLY DEVISE SHORT-TERM PLANS
Strategy on the go requires that you do have a strategy – it just requires that it be shorter term not longer term, and that you allow yourself the requisite degree of flexibility within your longer term plans.
This is a vital point. Long-term planning is built on your capacity to accurately predict not only the environment of the future but also the outcomes of each of your steps along the way. The problem we face is that the four compounding forces of the changing world make long-term prediction nigh on impossible. Prediction, as an activity, is getting harder and harder.
Consider this point, made by Daniel Gilbert in Stumbling on Happiness:
All brains – human brains, chimpanzee brains, even ordinary food-burying squirrel brains – make predictions about the immediate, local, personal future. They do this by using information about current events ('I smell something') and past events ('Last time I smelled this smell, something big tried to eat me') to anticipate what will happen next ('A big thing is about to – ').
But the more complex a system becomes, the less likely results in the past are going to be accurate predictors of results in the future. Think about this in terms of something we try to predict all the time: you can predict with a great degree of certainty what the weather in your immediate vicinity will be like in the next ten minutes, but it becomes much harder to make an accurate prediction if you expand the time span over which you are projecting and you increase the complexity of the system within which the predictions take place.
As both time span and complexity increase so does the margin for error when predicting the future. The preceding steps are an attempt to minimise the complexity you face, so add to that a reduction in the time span for which you are attempting to plan and you will reduce your margin of error.
This kind of short-term planning approach requires genuine speed. You must be able to devise and communicate your plan rapidly, and repeatedly, as you go.
CHANGE AND ADAPT
At a conference recently I heard Tim Macartney-Snape speak. He is one of the only people in history to climb Mount Everest without the assistance of oxygen. He was talking about how the hardest thing about climbing Everest, apart from the oxygen and the cold, is that the mountain 'makes its own weather'. Apparently, even the best climbing technology can't predict the weather patterns at that altitude. It reminded me of the marketplace. It makes its own weather: you either adapt and flip to stay on the mountain or you resist and get blown off it.
At the end of the day, you just need to be flexible. You must be able to change and adapt your actions and strategy in order to more effectively propel your business, your career and your life in the direction you desire, not just in little ways but in big ways. Sure you may have a whole lot of personal or business capital invested in doing business a certain way, but if the world changes so must you. This is true regardless of the infrastructure you have in place, the degrees you have or the business models that have made you profitable.
I remember when I first started my business almost a decade ago. I wanted to work with students in schools. I wanted to teach them how to make a smooth transition from school to work and to give them the inside scoop about résumés, interview skills, employment expectations and – most of all – about the changing career landscape. I thought a one-week course would be perfect. How wrong I was.
The mistake was not in the idea. There was a lot of support for the content I was intending to teach. It was the format of a one-week course that was wrong. But even this was not the mistake. There is nothing wrong with 'guessing' what will work. In many ways this is what we do when we strategise (we hate to admit it, but it is all just educated guessing). The mistake was spending a year perfecting my guess before I opened myself up to the feedback of the market.
Month after month I worked on what I would say, on what day in the one-week program I would say it, and what activities I would get them to engage in to drive their learning. Then, in less than a week, the market made it very clear that this was not what the schools could use. They could not afford to release students from class for that long. Even though it was agreed that it would provide a good learning opportunity, it was simply not practical. They wanted short (like one hour short), sharp sessions with simple take-home tip sheets for their students. Had I started earlier, had I committed before I was ready, had I acted in spite of my early confusion, I would have gained more clarity faster. I would have saved a year!
Action must happen now – risks must be taken: calculated, intelligent and high-payoff risks, but risks nonetheless. You can change and adapt. You must believe it is possible.
FINAL WORDS FOR THE NEW FLIPSTAR
Getting inspired while reading a book is the easy part. Talking to yourself and getting yourself psyched about a new idea for your career and company takes little courage. Sure you should be commended for picking the book up in the first place, and you should be celebrated for making it to the back. However, this is the catalyst, not the action. You have to get stuff done.
When you put this book down and head back to work you will be met by people who have not yet been flipped. They won't see the world through the same lens as you now do. They will be entrenched in out-of-date and inefficient practices, which have made them successful to date.
You should not reject, ridicule or try to 'fix' these people. At least, not straight away.And nor should you develop a sense of superiority because you now 'get it'. You will need these people in order to flip your organisation.
What you need now is to exercise some finesse, generate some real and impressive results and develop an inspiring view of their future.
Finesse because people will want to reject you and your ideas.New can often scare people.Your job is to 'play the game' and win these people over. Going head to head is usually not the best approach. Although, if you get no love – go hard! You might as well go down fighting. Then go and start your own company and kick their butt in the marketplace.
Results because at the end of the day in business this is what matters. No point having cool ideas, as flipped as they may be, if they don't get results. Being different for different's sake is no different to change for change's sake. If all it does is keep you interested and add some variety to your life, get a hobby. Play some, take some risks too. Just remember business is about getting results.
And finally, an inspiring view of their future, because people can and will change if they believe it is for the better. They want to know you have their best interests at heart, and deep down I think they just want to be inspired by the possibility of a better future.
My hope is that Flip has given you an inspiring view of the future. I wanted to provide some clarity about the changes we are dealing with daily, and most of all I wanted to give you an empowering mindset for meeting those changes head on.
Get off the side lines and into the ring. Throw some mud at the wall and see what sticks. No one really knows the answers. Not today, and certainly not tomorrow. But this is no excuse not to throw your hat in the ring. Play a hand or two in the card game of the new world of business and see how you fare. Or in closing, consider these words of a flipstar from days gone by:
It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.
Theodore Roosevelt
'Citizenship in a Republic'
23 April 1910
Or put more simply:
GET UP OFF YOUR BUTT
AND DO SOMETHING!!!
acknowledgements
Thanks firstly to my wife Sharon, for not killing me when I wake up in the middle of the night to write down a new idea and most of all for being a great mum to our two beautiful kids as I traipse around the world from hotel room to hotel room.
Secondly, to Dom Thurbon in my office. Dude, you're a flipstar no doubt. This book would not have been written without your help. And to Hilary Hinzmann in New York, this book would be nothing more than ordinary if it had not been for your wisdom, prose and basically keeping it real.
Also to my agent Mary Cunnane who persevered for literally eighteen months as Flip was, well, flipped again and again and again.We made it.
To Tim Whiting and the team at Random House, thanks for having the vision to see this was a book the market needed. It may have been a little ahead of its time when you first saw it, but now the world is ready. Thanks for your support and for the guidance and for trusting me back then.
Finally, to all of my clients. Without you, why write the book? Thanks for your support and I look forward to hanging out some more in the future.
notes
Chapter 1. The Four Forces of Change
1. Ghemawat, Pankaj, 'The Myth of Globalisation', Australian Financial Review, 'Review' section, 16 March 2007
2. The Time magazine article from which I sourced this information is no longer available online, but the main findings of the original report it references, produced by technology research firm IDC, are summarised by the Pakistan Software Export Board in its March 2007 online bulletin, available at: www.pseb.org.pk/bulletin/mar07/Bullet_details_march07.htm#test2
3. Pew Research Center, 'Luxury or Necessity? Things We Can't Live Without: The List Has Grown in the Last Decade', 14 December 2006, available at: pewresearch.org/pubs/323/luxury-or-necessity
Chapter 2. Fast, Good, Cheap – Pick 3
1. Ferdows, Kasra, Lewis, Michael A. and Machuca, Jose A. D., 'Rapid Fire Fulfillment', Harvard Business Review, vol. 82, no. 11, November 2004
2. Capon, Noel, The Marketing Mavens, Crown Business, New York, 2007, pp 177–79
3.Hansell, Saul, 'EBay Profit Rises 52 per cent', The New York Times, 19 April 2007
Chapter 3. Superficial is Anything But
1. Barbaro,Michael, 'Home Depot to Display an Environmental Label', The New York Times, 17 April 2007
2. L'Oréal 2005 Sustainable Development Report, available at: www.loreal.com/_en/_ww/group_new/pdf/LOREAL_RDD_GB.pdf
3. Howard Schultz's original memo can be viewed online at: starbucksgossip.typepad.com/_/2007/02/starbucks_chair_2.html
4. Vrabel, Jeff, 'McCartney To Anchor New Starbucks Label', www.billboard.com, 21 March 2007, available at: www.billboard.com/bbcom/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003561098
5. Chon, Gina, 'A Way Cool Strategy: Toyota's Scion Plans To Sell Fewer Cars', The Wall Street Journal, 10 November 2006
Chapter 4. Business is Personal
1. Stein, Ben, 'The Hard Rain That's Falling on Capitalism', The New York Times, 28 January 2007
2. Yankelovich Partners, 'A Crisis of Confidence: Rebuilding the Bonds of Trust', 2004, available at: www.compad.com.au/cms/prinfluences/workstation/upFiles/955316.State_of_Consumer_Trust_Report_-_Final_for_Distribution.pdf
3. 'Building Trust at Home in a Global World', Australian Financial Review, 19 March 2007
4. 'Neo Job-Meeting: l'événement recrutement sur Second Life', 19–21 June 2007, available at: www.neojobmeeting.com
5. Finextra Research, 'First Direct Hails Text Banking Milestone', 11 February 2005, available at: www.finextra.com/fullstory.asp?id=13225
6. Australian Interactive Media Association, 'Campaign Success for Mission Impossible 3 and Expansion of Hypertag Solution into New Zealand for AURA and Adshel', available at: www.aimia.com.au/i-cms?page=2263
7. Flynn, Laurie J., 'IBM to Introduce Workers' Networking Software', The New York Times, 22 January 2007
8. Levine,Meredith, 'Tell the Doctor All Your Problems, But Keep it to Less Than a Minute', The New York Times, 1 June 2004
Chapter 5. There is No Wisdom in Crowds
1. Kim,W. C., and Mauborgne, R., Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, Harvard Business School Press, 2005, pp. 7–8
2. 'BMW 750hL: The Ultimate Clean Machine', available at: www.bmwworld.com/models/750hl.htm
3. Totilo, Stephen, 'No Ruler Required For Xbox 360's Cost-Effective "Geometry": Trial Version of Game Has Been Downloaded More Than 200,000 Times', MTV.com, 12 January 2006, available at: www.mtv.com/news/articles/1520696/20060112/index.jhtml?headlines=true Bramwell, Tom, 'Reshaping the Past', Eurogamer, 2 February 2006, available at: www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=62715 Kushner, David, 'The Infinite Arcade', Wired, issue 14.08, August 2006, available at: www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.08/nintendo.html
4. 'Success of Nintendo's Wii Hinges on Games, Not Hardware', FOXNews, 12 October 2006, available at: www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,220299,00.html
5. Treaster, Joseph B, 'One-Stop Car Insurance Service, Body Work Included', The New York Times, 26 May 2007
Chapter 6. To Get Control, Give It Up
1. Rebello, Kathy, 'Inside Microsoft (Part 2): The Untold Story of How the Internet Forced Bill Gates to Reverse Course', BusinessWeek, 15 July 1996, available at: www.businessweek.com/1996/29/b34842.htm
2. 'Intellectual Piracy in China', News Hour with Jim Lehrer, 13 October 2005, available at: www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/asia/july-dec05/china_10-13.html
3. Bloomberg News, 'Piracy in China of Music, Software D
raws Ire of U.S.', The Seattle Times, 10 April 2007
4. Pillar, Charles, 'How Piracy Opens Doors for Windows', Los Angeles Times, 9 April 2006
5. Anastasi, M.A., 'Sony Exec:We Will Beat Napster', New Yorkers For Fair Use, 17 August 2000, available at: http://www.nyfairuse.org/sony.xhtml
6. Dubber, Andrew, 'The Real Reason Koopa is Important', New Music Strategies, 27 February 2007, available at: newmusicstrategies.com/2007/02/27/the-real-story-ofkoopa
7. Goldstein, Patrick, 'Hollywood is Seeing Fans Pull a Power Play', Los Angeles Times, 23 January 2007
8. For more information on Cory Doctorow's work, see his website: www.craphound.com
9. Hunt, Tara, 'Chevy Tahoe's First Mistake', HorsePigCow (blog), 3 April 2006, available at: www.horsepigcow.com/2006/04/chevy-tahoes-first-mistake.html
10. Ochman, B.L., 'Won't It Be Funny When Chevy Tahoe Sends Cease & Desist Letters to Bloggers!', whatsnextblog.com, April 2006, available at: www.whatsnextblog.com/archives/2006/04/post_49.asp
11. Peper, Ed 'Now That We've Got Your Attention', GM FastLane Blog, 6 April 2006, available at: fastlane.gmblogs.com/archives/2006/04/now_that_weve_g_1.html
12. Godin, Seth, 'Web4', Seth Godin's Blog, 19 January 2007, available at: sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/01/web4.html
13. 'All Profit in the Wiki Workplace', Australian Financial Review, 29 March 2007, p. 57
Chapter 7. Action Precedes Clarity
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