by Rita McGrath
The rest of the HMH team is a publishing powerhouse. Lori Glazer and Michelle Triant in publicity masterfully laid out a complete campaign, with ideas I’d certainly never thought of. (Who knew there might be a specifically female angle to the book?) Brooke Borneman and Brianna Yamashita in marketing very quickly figured out the essence of the book’s “brand” and created marketing materials that would do it justice. Debbie Engel handled “subrights”—the agreements with publishers working in other languages—to have the book translated and marketed in their territories. We have had more than a few chuckles over the unpredictable process of guessing who is going to be interested in what internationally. Katie Kimmerer oversaw the book in production. As an author, you really don’t know how complicated this can be beyond getting the thing written. Michaela Sullivan took charge of the cover design, and I have to say her work was marvelous. Not only did she come up with a design that we all love, she came up with three of them! Rosemary McGuinness in editorial seems to thrive on detail-oriented and unforgiving tasks like getting footnotes in all the right places.
The People in and Around the Book
Of course, the mechanics around the book wouldn’t amount to anything without the insights and stories of the people who provided the real-life stories and inspiration that bring it to life. Ryan McManus has taught me a tremendous amount about how strategy, innovation, and digital transformation are all coming together and has been a pleasure to work with. We’re busy now figuring out how to help organizations cope with inflection points while building capability at the same time.
Ron Boire offered deep insights from the front lines of retail and the pragmatic activities needed to move a large organization along. Michael Sikorsky, Tracey Zimmerman, and the team at Robots & Pencils are helping us design and automate strategy and innovation tools. We’re blessed with many other collaboration partners, each of whom has a secret talent with respect to some aspect of the strategy and innovation challenge. Alex Osterwalder at Strategyzer, Mike Burn and Greg Galle at Solve Next, Christian Rangen at Engage/Innovate, Kaihan Krippendorff at Outthinker, Linda Yates and the bold accelerators at Mach49, and the team at Innosight, among others, have been fabulous co-creators and partners.
There are also whole communities of authors and thinkers that I’m so grateful to be part of. My colleagues in the Silicon Guild are an inspiring group, and it’s a privilege to be among them. Marshall Goldsmith and his 100 Coaches group are committed to helping clients get better and to helping one another grow and develop. Richard Straub has single-handedly (it seems) created a vibrant community of thinkers honoring the legacy of Peter Drucker, celebrated annually at the Drucker Forum in Vienna. It’s become an annual pilgrimage site for John and me. And every other year, we enjoy the glitter of the Thinkers50 annual event.
Finally, to those whose stories provided me with the inspiration to learn how to see around corners and benefit from capitalizing early on inflection points, I am so grateful.
Notes
* * *
Introduction
“are about to change”: Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company and Career (New York: Doubleday, 1996).
discovery-driven growth playbook: Rita Gunther McGrath and Ian C. MacMillan, Discovery-Driven Growth: A Breakthrough Process to Reduce Risk and Seize Opportunity (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2009).
“perennial gale of creative destruction”: Joseph A. Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy (New York: Harper Perennial, 1942).
“‘I can’t afford hearing aids’”: Paula Span, “Hearing Aids at the Mall? Perhaps Congress Could Make It Happen,” New York Times, June 12, 2017.
seems like overkill: Kim Cavitt, “2016: Will It Be the Year of the Disruption? Gosh, I Hope So,” HearingHealthMatters.org, February 26, 2016, https://hearinghealthmatters.org/hearinprivatepractice/2016/hearing-aid-industry-disruption-2016-gosh-i-hope-so/.
problem of epidemic proportions: “The Hidden Risks of Hearing Loss,” Johns Hopkins Medicine, n.d., https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/healthy_aging/healthy_body/the-hidden-risks-of-hearing-loss.
“every word of your conversations”: “Hear Better,” Bose, 2019, https://www.bose.com/en_us/products/wellness/conversation_enhancing_headphones/hearphones.html.
self-fitting hearing aid: “FDA Allows Marketing of First Self-Fitting Hearing Aid Controlled by the User,” FDA, press release, October 5, 2018, https://www.fda.gov/NewsEvents/Newsroom/PressAnnouncements/ucm622692.htm.
fundamentally altered forever: Morgan Housel, “When You Change the World and No One Notices,” Collaborative Fund, September 3, 2016, http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/when-you-change-the-world-and-no-one-notices/.
how technologies are commercialized: “Gartner Hype Cycle,” Gartner, https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/gartner-hype-cycle.
making the same decision: William A. Sahlman and Howard Stevenson, “Capital Market Myopia,” Journal of Business Venturing 1 (1985): 7–30.
“at the periphery”: Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive.
Amazon in 1996: Michael H. Martin, “The Next Big Thing: A Bookstore?,” Fortune, December 9, 1996.
need to transform: Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovator’s Dilemma: When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1997).
1. Snow Melts From the Edges
“doesn’t know what to do”: Shona Ghosh, “‘Christ, This Guy Has the Fate of European Democracy in His Hands,’” Business Insider Australia, May 24, 2018, https://www.businessinsider.com.au/mark-zuckerberg-facebook-power-democracy-2018-5.
business model pushback: Russell Brandom, “Google’s Bad Day in Congress Came at the Worst Possible Time,” The Verge, September 6, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/6/17827854/google-congress-regulation-facebook-twitter-ftc-complaints.
“where it is most exposed”: Andrew S. Grove, Only the Paranoid Survive: How to Exploit the Crisis Points That Challenge Every Company and Career (New York: Doubleday, 1996).
“access to information”: “Privacy: An Interpretation of the Library Bill of Rights,” American Library Association, amended July 1, 2014, http://www.ala.org/advocacy/intfreedom/librarybill/interpretations/privacy.
$88 billion in 2017: Sarah Sluis, “Digital Ad Market Soars to $88 Billion, Facebook and Google Contribute 90% of Growth,” AdExchanger, May 10, 2018, https://adexchanger.com/online-advertising/digital-ad-market-soars-to-88-billion-facebook-and-google-contribute-90-of-growth/.
“Do you have pets?”: Steve Kroft, “The Data Brokers: Selling Your Personal Information,” 60 Minutes, first aired March 9, 2014, CBS, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/the-data-brokers-selling-your-personal-information/.
any privileged information: Alessandro Acquisti, “Privacy and Market Failures: Three Reasons for Concern, and Three Reasons for Hope,” Journal on Telecommunications and High Technology Law 10, no. 2 (2012): 227–33, http://jthtl.org/content/articles/V10I2/JTHTLv10i2_Acquisti.PDF.
accountable to no one: Samantha Schmidt, “This Site Will Remove Your Mug Shot—for a Price, Authorities Say. Its Owners Are Charged with Extortion,” Morning Mix (blog), Washington Post, May 18, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2018/05/18/this-site-will-remove-your-mug-shot-for-a-price-now-its-owners-are-charged-with-extortion/.
“third-party cookies”: “Disable Third-Party Cookies in Firefox to Stop Some Types of Tracking by Advertisers,” Mozilla Support, n.d., https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/disable-third-party-cookies.
you’ve been doing on the web: Jason Murdock, “Facebook Is Tracking You Online, Even If You Don’t Have an Account,” Newsweek, April 17, 2018, https://www.newsweek.com/facebook-tracking-you-even-if-you-dont-have-account-888699.
network having my data: David Nield, “Here’s All the Data Collected from You as You Browse the Web,” Field Guide, Gizmodo, December 6, 2017, https://fieldguide.gizmodo.com/heres-all-the-data-
collected-from-you-as-you-browse-the-1820779304.
“connection between the two events”: Katherine Bindley, “Why Facebook Still Seems to Spy on You,” Wall Street Journal, February 28, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-ads-will-follow-you-even-when-your-privacy-settings-are-dialed-up-11551362400?mod=hp_lead_pos7.
sharing highly personal information with Facebook: Sam Schechner and Marc Secada, “You Give Apps Sensitive Personal Information. Then They Tell Facebook,” Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2019, https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-give-apps-sensitive-personal-information-then-they-tell-facebook-11550851636?mod=searchresults&page=1&pos=4&mod=article_inline.
connected to the same network: Gordon Whitson, “How to Stop Your Smart TV from Tracking What You Watch,” New York Times, July 26, 2018.
“a little magical”: Sapna Maheshwari, “TVs That Find an Audience for Your Data,” New York Times, July 5, 2018.
elsewhere in their homes: Sarah Perez, “47.3 Million U.S. Adults Have Access to a Smart Speaker, Report Says,” TechCrunch, March 7, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/03/07/47-3-million-u-s-adults-have-access-to-a-smart-speaker-report-says/.
hundreds of miles away: Corky Siemaszko, “Little Did She Know, Alexa Was Recording Every Word She Said,” NBC News, May 24, 2018, https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/little-did-she-know-alexa-was-recording-every-word-she-n877286.
“Dumb fucks”: Nicholas Carlson, “Well, These New Zuckerberg IMs Won’t Help Facebook’s Privacy Problems,” Business Insider, May 13, 2010, https://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5.
outside academic institutions in 2006: Saul Hansell, “Site Previously for Students Will Be Opened to Others,” New York Times, September 12, 2006.
which they hoped would “dominate”: Adam Fisher, “Sex, Beer, and Coding: Inside Facebook’s Wild Early Days,” Wired, July 10, 2010, https://www.wired.com/story/sex-beer-and-coding-inside-facebooks-wild-early-days/. See also Adam Fisher, Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (New York: Twelve, 2018).
forays into targeted ads: Rebecca Greenfield, “2012: The Year Facebook Finally Tried to Make Some Money,” Atlantic, December 14, 2012, https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/12/2012-year-facebook-finally-tried-make-some-money/320493/.
automated access to advertisers: Natasha Lomas, “A Brief History of Facebook’s Privacy Hostility Ahead of Zuckerberg’s Testimony,” TechCrunch, April 10, 2018, https://techcrunch.com/2018/04/10/a-brief-history-of-facebooks-privacy-hostility-ahead-of-zuckerbergs-testimony/.
“one can find”: Julia Angwin and Terry Parris Jr., “Facebook Lets Advertisers Exclude Users by Race,” ProPublica, October 28, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/facebook-lets-advertisers-exclude-users-by-race.
“more choices for everyone”: Rita Gunther McGrath, “The EU’s $5 Billion Fine Is Bad News for Google—but It’s Not About the Money,” Fortune, July 20, 2018, http://fortune.com/2018/07/20/google-android-chrome-eu-fine-antitrust-laws/.
poor crisis response: James F. Haggerty, “Commentary: How Facebook’s Response Ignited the Cambridge Analytica Scandal,” Fortune, March 27, 2018, http://fortune.com/2018/03/27/facebook-cambridge-analytica-data-scandal-crisis-investigation/.
targeting political ads: Kevin Granville, “Facebook and Cambridge Analytica: What You Need to Know as Fallout Widens,” New York Times, March 19, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/19/technology/facebook-cambridge-analytica-explained.html.
has emerged: Lindsey Bever, “Why Apple Co-Founder Steve Wozniak Is Joining the #DeleteFacebook Movement,” The Switch (newsletter), Washington Post, April 9, 2018, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/04/09/why-apple-co-founder-steve-wozniak-is-joining-the-deletefacebook-movement/.
the way of Myspace: John Herrman, “What Happens When Facebook Goes the Way of Myspace?,” New York Times Magazine, December 12, 2018.
declared #DeleteFacebook: Ed Mazza, “Apple Co-founder Steve Wozniak Ditches Facebook After Data Scandal,” HuffPost, April 9, 2018, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/steve-wozniak-quits-facebook_us_5acaf56ee4b09d0a119529bf.
“at war”: Madison Malone Kircher, “Facebook Is at War and Mark Zuckerberg Is Its General,” Intelligencer, November 19, 2018, http://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/11/mark-zuckerberg-declared-facebook-at-war.html.
“days are numbered”: Olivia Solon, “George Soros: Facebook and Google a Menace to Society,” Guardian, January 26, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/jan/25/george-soros-facebook-and-google-are-a-menace-to-society.
“answers to such questions”: Tim Berners-Lee, “The World Wide Web: Past, Present and Future,” August 1996, https://www.w3.org/People/Berners-Lee/1996/ppf.html.
Facebook’s News Feed feature: Danah Boyd, “Will Facebook Learn from Its Mistake?,” Apophenia (blog), September 7, 2006, http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2006/09/07/will_facebook_l.html; Danah Boyd, “Facebook’s ‘Privacy Trainwreck’: Exposure, Invasion, and Drama,” Apophenia (blog), September 8, 2006, https://www.danah.org/papers/FacebookAndPrivacy.html.
“Friend Is a Fake”: Nick O’Neill, “7 Surefire Signs Your New Facebook Friend Is a Fake,” Adweek, March 3, 2011, https://www.adweek.com/digital/fake-facebook-friend/.
“inside the company”: James Jacoby and Anya Bourg, “Facebook Insider Says Warnings About Data Safety Went Unheeded by Executives,” Frontline, first aired March 20, 2018, PBS, https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/article/facebook-insider-says-warnings-about-data-safety-went-unheeded-by-executives/.
“ripping apart society”: James Vincent, “Former Facebook Exec Says Social Media Is Ripping Apart Society,” The Verge, December 11, 2017, https://www.theverge.com/2017/12/11/16761016/former-facebook-exec-ripping-apart-society.
social media addiction: Nellie Bowles, “Early Facebook and Google Employees Form Coalition to Fight What They Built,” New York Times, February 5, 2018.
all around the Internet: Antonio García Martínez, Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).
“as to be un-mutable”: Antonio Garcia-Martinez, “I’m an Ex–Facebook Exec: Don’t Believe What They Tell You About Ads,” Guardian, May 2, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/02/facebook-executive-advertising-data-comment.
primary source of income: Brian Mastroianni, “Survey: More Americans Worried About Data Privacy Than Income,” CBS News, January 28, 2016, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/truste-survey-more-americans-concerned-about-data-privacy-than-losing-income/.
claw back access: Paul Mozur, Mark Scott, and Mike Isaac, “Facebook Is Navigating a Global Power Struggle,” New York Times, September 18, 2017.
for Facebook’s business: Larry Elliott, “Is It Time to Break Up the Tech Giants Such as Facebook?,” Guardian, March 25, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/mar/25/is-it-time-to-break-up-the-tech-giants-such-as-facebook.
their thin margins: Sapna Maheshwari, “Senators Urge Investigation of Smart TV Industry, Citing Privacy Concerns,” New York Times, July 13, 2018.
on the right track: Deepa Seetharaman, “Facebook Morale Takes a Tumble Along with Stock Price,” Wall Street Journal, November 14, 2018, https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-morale-takes-a-tumble-along-with-stock-price-1542200400.
work at other organizations: Casey Newton, “Facebook’s Morale Problem Is Getting Worse,” The Verge, December 6, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/12/6/18128267/facebook-morale-uk-parliament-emails-privacy-competition.
turn into purchases: Leo Sun, “Amazon Becomes a Major Contender in Digital Advertising: A Foolish Take,” USA Today, October 2, 2018, https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2018/10/02/amazon-contender-digital-advertising-sales/37920325/b.
“something new”: Salvador Rodriguez, “Former Instagram CEO on Why He Quit Facebook: ‘No One Ever Leaves a Job Because Everything’s Awesome,’” CNBC, October 15, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/15/
instagram-former-ceo-kevin-systrom-on-why-he-left-facebook.html.
The Signals Are Talking: Amy Webb, The Signals Are Talking: Why Today’s Fringe Is Tomorrow’s Mainstream (New York: PublicAffairs, 2016).
as a “family”: Sara Salinas, “Facebook’s ‘Family’ Is Getting Smaller, as Several Executives Head for the Exits in a Turbulent Year,” CNBC, September 3, 2018, https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/01/all-the-facebook-executives-who-announced-departure-so-far-in-2018.html.
“had on the world”: Nick Bilton, “‘Oh My God, What Have I Done’: Some Early Facebook Employees Regret the Monster They Created,” Vanity Fair, October 12, 2017, https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/10/early-facebook-employees-regret-the-monster-they-created.
creating blind spots: Salvador Rodriguez, “Inside Facebook’s ‘Cult-Like’ Workplace, Where Dissent Is Discouraged and Employees Pretend to Be Happy All the Time,” CNBC, January 8, 2019, https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/08/facebook-culture-cult-performance-review-process-blamed.html.
had access to it: Aarti Shahani, “Mark Zuckerberg’s Big Blind Spot and the Conflict Within Facebook,” All Tech Considered (blog), NPR, October 31, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/10/31/560667628/mark-zuckerbergs-big-blind-spot-and-the-conflict-within-facebook.
“anything to hide”: Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook,” The New Yorker, September 20, 2010, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/09/20/the-face-of-facebook.
unsavory conduct: Jen Chung, “After Porn & Masturbation Incidents, LinkNYC Removes Web Browsing from WiFi Kiosks,” Gothamist, September 14, 2016, http://gothamist.com/2016/09/14/free_porno_spigots_cut_off.php.