Introduction: More Than SurvivalIt's 3:00 A.M., and it's hot. I can't sleep. My laptop can't reach the Internet through the overburdened phone system here at the Cleveland Holiday Inn. Frustrated, anxious and exhausted, I jump in my car and drive the deserted streets of northern Ohio.
Around the corner, I pass a Kinko's. The lights are on. They're always on. I walk in to find hundreds of thousands of dollars of electronics, all just waiting for me. Color copiers, fax machines and an entire room full of fast computers with a T1 connection to the Internet. Five minutes and twenty dollars later, I've checked my mail and printed out a memo. Time to get some sleep.
But I can't get to sleep. I sit up for hours, wondering about that Kinko's.
How did Kinko's grow from one tiny store in California all the way to an all-night home office in Cleveland? (Turns out there were eight within sixteen miles of my hotel.) It took a couple of decades, but the company grew and changed and expanded -- almost like an organism, spreading across the country until it had filled every niche it could find.
At the same time that Kinko's was growing, dozens of its competitors were silently shrinking, disappearing, becoming extinct.
Look at the development of any business and it's bound to be surprising. Surprising in how unplanned, irregular and random it is. Some businesses grow and ooze and morph and expand, others reach a certain spot and freeze. Why do some companies thrive while other companies, though similar, fade away? I knew that there must be a pattern and a dynamic behind all this apparent chaos, but I was having trouble finding it.
I've been fascinated with the work of Charles Darwin for a long time, and it occurred to me that companies were very much like species. They were changing and evolving right before our eyes. However, unlike animals, companies fret about this change so much it makes them miserable.
Why is there so much pain in our business lives? It's almost as if people were taking Charles Darwin at his word, focusing on "survival of the fittest" instead of something more than that. If all you do at work is hope to survive, your day can't be much fun.
We're all working too hard. Putting in more hours than we'd like, nervous about the future, uncertain about our roles and our goals. We work too hard to hope for mere survival. Our goal must be to thrive and prosper, not just get by.
Darwin writes extensively about extinction. We don't want to grapple with the idea that our company is about to become extinct. No one wants to become extinct, but the alternative -- change -- is hard. Going through all of the uncertainty and hassle to barely survive (or worse, become extinct) doesn't seem fair.
We don't know how to talk about change and evolution. We know it's here and it's real and it's essential and it's painful, but we don't have the words for it. I believe that there's a goal beyond survival, that we can actually thrive and find joy in working with all the chaos that surrounds us. That we can look forward to change and turbulence as an opportunity to increase our success. My hope is that this book will give you the words to describe these phenomena as well as an understanding of how they work.
There is no secret spell or closely guarded incantation. The solution is written down everywhere you look, from the park to the zoo to the checkout at your local grocery store. And the idea that evolution can work in business is not news, either. Jack Welch and GE have been doing it for years, and will be happy to teach you about it.
So why doesn't everyone use this successful approach? Because we have a genetic reflex to avoid change. The secret of this book is that your success is not going to be due to your plan. It's the process you use that matters.
I'm proposing a pretty radical way of thinking about business, but one that's nothing new to an evolutionary biologist. As a result, there are a lot of oddball terms and occasional side trips to go on as you read these pages. I hope you'll bear with me, because the end result is a totally different set of glasses you can use to look at your job, your career, your company and even the companies you invest in. (See the author's note at the end of this book for a full and complete disclaimer about scientific accuracy.)
If you try to stuff these ideas through the filter of the way you work today, they won't make sense. This is a very different sort of paradigm for what companies do all day, and it requires a different posture and approach.
My goal in writing this book is to explain the paradigm and sell you on why you ought to run your business with it. The tactics will reveal themselves as you head down the path to a brand-new kind of organization.
The benefits are simple: less stress at work, less chaos in your daily life and occasionally, if you're lucky, a landslide success that pays off big-time.
Once you have the words, I'm confident you'll find ways to let the power of evolution go to work. When it does, you'll discover that you can create explosive group and personal success that can further transform your company.
Most of us view change as a threat, and survival as the goal. Change is not a threat, it's an opportunity. Survival is not the goal, transformative success is. It's thrilling if you give it a chance. This book contains an idea about ideas. An ideavirus about change, one I hope you will find worth spreading.
The Paul Orfalea Story: A Process, Not a Plan
One of my favorite entrepreneurs is a guy named Paul Orfalea. Paul is brilliant and quite successful, but he's unbelievably modest and also very honest about his shortcomings.
Paul is profoundly dyslexic. He didn't learn how to read until he was well into elementary school and did nothing in high school that would be associated with the idea of success. He went to college but didn't care an awful lot about his classes. It was the perfect background for an entrepreneur.
Paul started a little copy shop (so little he had to wheel the machine outside to make room for customers) on his college campus. He sold pens and paper and made copies. That store grew to become Kinko's, a chain with more than one thousand outlets that he was able to sell for more than two hundred million dollars to an investment group.
The secret to Kinko's success is disarmingly straightforward. "My reading was still poor and I had no mechanical ability, so I thought that anybody who worked for me could do the job better," Paul explains. He set up a unique co-ownership structure that let him grow the business with more flexibility than a franchise could offer. The end result is that for years, Kinko's stores were partly owned by someone local.
Paul described his job to me this way, "I just go from store to store, see what they're doing right and then tell all the other stores about it."
By allowing local entrepreneurs to make millions of low-cost experiments every year (just three per day per store gets you to that level) and then communicating the successful ones to the other stores, he was able to set the process in motion that led to
that all-night store I found in Cleveland. The Cleveland store wasn't part of a specific plan, but it was very much the outcome of a specific process.
Very little specialized knowledge is required to open a copy shop. Yet Kinko's dramatically outpaced every other competitor by reinventing what a copy shop was, every single day. Kinko's did
"I just go from store to store, see what they're doing right and then tell all the other stores about it."
not have a patented new technology. Instead, it had a posture about change that treated innovations and chaos as good things, not threats.
The more successful Kinko's got, the more likely it was to get job applications and coventure deals with people who made the company even more successful. The more Kinko's stores there were, the more likely it was that people would seek one out. The better Kinko's did, the more successful it became.
Kinko's became a success. Working there was fun because the company attracted people who could compound its growth. Kinko's stopped worrying about surviving and enjoyed the ride.
It's interesting to see that since the takeover of Kinko's by an investor group, new management has bought out the individual owners and installed a command and control system. Kinkos.com is regrouping and the entire chain is experiencing slower growth, despite external economic and technical conditions that should have allowed it to grow even faster.
Paul was right. All of us are smarter than any one of us.
Survival Is Not Enough: The Summary
1. Change is the new normal. Rather than thinking of work as a series of stable times interrupted by moments of change, companies must now recognize work as constant change, with only occasional moments of stability. 2. If you and your company are not taking advantage of change, change will defeat you.
3. Stability is bad news for this new kind of company. It requires change to succeed.
4. Change presents new opportunities for companies to capture large markets. Change is the enemy of the current leader. Change also represents opportunities for individuals to advance their careers.
5. Companies that introduce products and services that represent significant changes can find that they lead to rapid, runaway successes.
6. Companies that cause change attract employees who want to cause change. Companies that are afraid of change attract employees who are afraid of change.
7. Many employees fear change. Fear of change is rational -- after all, it can lead to bad outcomes. But now, not changing is more likely to lead to a bad outcome than changing!
8. Management can't force employees to overcome their fear of change through short-term motivation.
9. By redefining what change is, companies can change the dynamic of "change equals death" to "change equals opportunity."
10. The way species deal with change is by evolving.
11. Companies can evolve in ways similar to those used by species.
12. Companies will evolve if management allows them to.
13. There are three ways that species evolve: natural selection, sexual selection and mutation.
14. Companies can do the same thing by using farmers, hunters and wizards to initiate changes in their organizations
15. Companies that embrace change for change's sake, companies that view a state of constant flux as a stable equilibrium, zoom. And zooming companies evolve faster and easier because they don't obstruct the forces of change.
16. Once you train the organization to evolve regularly and effortlessly, change is no longer a threat. Instead, it's an asset, because it causes your competitors to become extinct.
17. Many CEOs reject evolution and do whatever they can to stop it.
18. If your company is too reliant on your winning strategy, you won't evolve as quickly.
19. A runaway success occurs when a positive feedback loop reinforces early success.
20. Fast feedback loops teach you what's working and -- more important -- get you to change what's not.
21. Everyone in your company can work to reinvent what you do in parallel, dramatically increasing the speed of innovation within the company.
22. Low-cost, low-risk, real-world tests are the most likely to have high return on investment.
23. Your company's posture regarding the process of change is far more important than the actual changes you implement.
24. If you have employees who don't embrace this posture, they will slow you down and cause you to make bad decisions.
25. A company that zooms will attract zoomers, allowing it to enter runaway, dramatically increasing its advantage over its competitors in a changing environment.
To help you manage the new terms that appear in this book (in boldface the first time they appear), you'll find a glossary with more details at the end.
Copyright © 2002 by Do You Zoom, Inc.
Format: Audio
