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- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Fachliteratur
- Sprache: Englisch
Understand the barriers to change and cultivate a reinvention mindset that will make you impervious to disruption In our world of incessant change, we are all threatened by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity--at the individual and organizational levels. Undisruptable will give you a new lens through which to consider change as an opportunity rather than an obstacle. You'll be inspired to consider the big questions of today: What does the future hold? What does the exponential growth of technology mean for the world of work? What does a changing job market mean for future generations? What do waves of disruption mean for business leaders? Society is evolving at breakneck speed. What does this mean for all of us? Read Undisruptable to bridge the chaos and build the resilience you need to move forward. While we cannot see into the future, there are repeatable patterns that we can understand. Undisruptable demystifies the principles of change through a blend of analogies, innovation frameworks and exemplars of change such as Fujifilm and Arnold Schwarzenegger. The first step to becoming undisputable is to realize that evolution is a natural part of life, and nature provides many examples. Undisruptable will help you to: * Understand the principles of change * Overcome the barriers to change * See change as an opportunity and not an obstacle * Utilize simple frameworks and examples to guide you on your transformation By the end of this book, you will have the essential tools and techniques to foster a reinvention mindset that will help you and your organization to become Undisruptable. This book is part of a 3-part series. Part 2 looks at the biases and mental obstacles that prevent change. Part 3 examines the best ways to communicate change within an organization.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by Dee Hock, founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA
Introduction: Why You Should Read This Book
Why Reinvent?
The Exponential Rate of Change
Personal Transformation
Reading the Tides
Overview of Undisruptable
PART 1: Permanent Reinvention Framework
1 Resistance to Reinvention
Transformational Change or Incremental Change?
Chapter One Takeaways
Considerations
Notes
2 Kintsugi Thinking
From Quantity Comes Quality
Amazon Extinguishes the Fire
Chapter Two Takeaways
Considerations
Note
3 S Curves: A Framework for Permanent Reinvention
S Curves
Phase One
Phase Two
Phase Three
Phase Four
Phase Five
Phase Six: Jumping the S Curve
Return on Capability (RoC)
Building Capability Before You Need It
Chapter Three Takeaways
Considerations
Note
4 The Ouroboros: Infinity Curve
Why the Infinity Curve?
Chapter Four Takeaways
Considerations
5 Recalibrating Time
Chapter Five Takeaways
Considerations
PART 2: Permanent Reinvention Lenses
6 The Wasp Trap: Personal Vision
Where There Is No Vision, the People Perish
Retirement
Living in Synchronicity
The RAS: The Science of Synchronicity
The Mind Gym
Chapter Six Takeaways
Considerations
7 All Roads Lead to Rome: Organisational Vision
All Roads Lead to Rome
Apple and the Digital Hub
A Vision and Execute Model
Chapter Seven Takeaways
8 Managing Contrasts
S Curves as Opposites
The Tension of Opposites
Chapter Eight Takeaways
Questions
9 Crab Curves
We Are One Hundred Trillion Cells
Individual Shells
Leadership Shells
Business Model Shells
Organisational Shells
Stuck in Our Shells?
Chapter Nine Takeaways
Considerations
10 Here Be Dragons
The Ideal Road Not Taken
Reframing Fear
The Dose Makes the Poison – What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Stronger
Post-Traumatic Growth
Chapter Ten Takeaways
Considerations
PART 3: Undisruptable in Action
11 The Immortal Jellyfish: Fujifilm
Unbundling Capabilities
Immortal Fujifilm
The Multi-Billion Dollar Meeting
Top of Your Game?
A Portfolio of Capabilities
Chapter Eleven Takeaways
Considerations
12 Defeated by Victory: Nokia
BlackBerry Blues – The Arrogance of Success
Chapter Twelve Takeaways
Considerations
13 Di‘S’ney Curves
Building Capability
Pursuing a Vision
Serendipity Strikes
Silly Symphonies
Disney's Folly
Chapter Thirteen Takeaways
Considerations
14 I'll be Back (Again and Again): ‘S’chwarzenegger Curves
Chapter Fourteen Takeaways
Considerations
15 Cochrane Curves – Overcoming Crises and Fear
Chapter Fifteen Takeaways
Considerations
Notes
16 The Coconut Trap
You Are Not Your Jersey
Systematic Abandonment
The Flight of the Butterfly
Chapter Sixteen Takeaways
Reflections
References
Chapter 1: Resistance to Reinvention
Chapter 2: Kintsugi Thinking
Chapter 3: S Curves: A Framework for Permanent Reinvention
Chapter 4: The Ouroboros: Infinity Curve
Chapter 5: Recalibrating Time
Chapter 6: The Wasp Trap: Personal Vision
Chapter 7: All Roads Lead to Rome: Organisational Vision
Chapter 8: Managing Contrasts
Chapter 9: Crab Curves
Chapter 10: Here Be Dragons
Chapter 11: The Immortal Jellyfish: Fujifilm
Chapter 12: Defeated by Victory: Nokia
Chapter 13: Di‘S’ney Curves
Chapter 14: I'll Be Back (Again and Again): ‘S’chwarzenegger Curves
Chapter 15: Cochrane Curves – Overcoming Crises and Fear
Chapter 16: The Coconut Trap
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Introduction
Figure 0.1 The Optometrist's contraption
Figure 0.2 Exponential change
Chapter 1
Figure 1.1 Using the former self to fuel the future self
Figure 1.2 brain rejects new ideas
Chapter 2
Figure 2.1 Kintsugi thinking
Chapter 3
Figure 3.1 A faster horse
Figure 3.2 A jump too far?
Figure 3.3 Phase One
Figure 3.4 Phase Two
Figure 3.5 Phase Three
Figure 3.6 Phase Four
Figure 3.7 Phase Five
Figure 3.8 Jumping the S curve
Figure 3.9 Return on capability
Figure 3.10 Jumping the S curve
Figure 3.11 S curve jump
Chapter 4
Figure 4.1 The ouroboros
Figure 4.2 An arrested moment in time
Figure 4.3 The infinity curve
Chapter 5
Figure 5.1 The mayfly and the sequoia
Figure 5.2 A linear life
Figure 5.3 Linear life cycle
Figure 5.4 Cyclical life
Figure 5.5 Linear life plot exercise
Figure 5.6 Cyclical life plot exercise
Chapter 6
Figure 6.1 The wasp trap
Figure 6.2 Vision lives on top of the S curve
Figure 6.3 The RAS sniffer dog
Figure 6.4 Vision Exercise 1
Figure 6.5 Vision Exercise 2
Chapter 7
Figure 7.1 Archimedes' death ray
Figure 7.2 Octopus on rollerblades
Figure 7.3 Roman hub and spoke
Figure 7.4 Roman hub and spoke network
Figure 7.5 Apple's digital hub
Figure 7.6 Vision and execute
Chapter 8
Figure 8.1 Trough and crest
Figure 8.2 Perpetual becoming
Chapter 9
Figure 9.1 Leaving room to grow
Figure 9.2 Peak and prosper
Chapter 10
Figure 10.1 Here be dragons
Figure 10.2 Get comfortable being uncomfortable
Chapter 11
Figure 11.1 Typical jellyfish life cycle
Figure 11.2 Immortal jellyfish life cycle
Figure 11.3 Sweat in peace
Figure 11.4 Develop capability
Chapter 12
Figure 12.1 Nokia curves
Figure 12.2 Nokia stock 2007–2020 ‘long-kiss-goodnight’
Figure 12.3 Nokia king of the mountain
Figure 12.4 Nokia king of the molehill
Figure 12.5 BlackBerry long kiss goodnight curve 2008–2020
Chapter 13
Figure 13.1 Di‘S’ney curve 1
Figure 13.2 Di‘S’ney curve 2
Figure 13.3 Di‘S’ney curve 3
Figure 13.4 Di‘S’ney curve 4
Figure 13.5 Di‘S’ney curve 5
Figure 13.6 Di‘S’ney curve 6
Chapter 14
Figure 14.1 ‘S’chwarzenegger curve 1
Figure 14.2 ‘S’chwarzenegger curve 2
Figure 14.3 ‘S’chwarzenegger curve 3
Chapter 15
Figure 15.1 Cochrane curves
Chapter 16
Figure 16.1 The coconut trap
Figure 16.2 Clinging to the past
Figure 16.3 ‘Flight of the Butterfly’
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
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Undisruptable
A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life
Aidan McCullen
This edition first published 2021.
© 2021 by Aidan McCullen
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To my wonderful wife, Niamh and sons, Josh and Jake. Thank you for all your love and support and for putting up with my crazy stories.
Foreword by Dee Hock, founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA
Out of the lumber of things we are taught, the gravel of our experience and the cement of the things we observe, we slowly erect an edifice, an unconscious, internal model of reality. We gradually fill it with the furniture of habit, custom, belief, and bias. We get comfortable there. It's our sanctuary. Through its windows, small and distorted as they may be, we view society and the world. Our internal model of reality is how we make sense of the world, and it can be a badly built place indeed. Even if it is well constructed, it may have become archaic. Everything that gave rise to it may have changed, since the natural world and human society are never stagnant. They are constantly becoming.
During the past four decades the external world has been changing at a rate enormously greater than the rate at which our internal models have been evolving. Nothing behaves as we think it should. Nothing makes sense. At such times the world appears to be staging a madhouse. It is never a madhouse. It is merely the great tide of evolution in temporary flood, moving this way and that, piling up against that which obstructs its flow, trying to break loose and sweep away the internal model that opposes it.
At such times, we experience extreme dissonance and stress. At the heart of that dissonance and stress is paradox. The more powerful and entrenched our internal model of reality, the more difficult it is to perceive and understand the fundamental nature of the changed world we experience. Yet without such perception and understanding it is extremely difficult to understand and change our internal model. This is precisely where we are today, and it is rapidly getting worse.
Deep in most of us, below our awareness, indelibly implanted there by three centuries of the Industrial Age, is the mechanistic, separatist, cause-and-effect, command-and-control, machine model of reality. People are more than machines. The universe is more than a clock. Nature is more than a sequence of cogs and wheels. Nor is it a collection of bits and bytes. Numbers are not values. Mathematics can never be the measure of all things. Words and syllables are not reality. And science is not a deity. All human knowledge is an approximation, useful at times, foolish at others.
When our internal model of reality is in conflict with rapidly changing external realities, there are three ways to respond: First, we can cling to our old internal model and attempt to impose it on external conditions in a futile attempt to make them conform to our expectations. That is what our present mechanistic, societal institutions compel us to attempt, and what we continually dissipate our ingenuity and ability trying to achieve. Attempting to impose an archaic internal model on a changed external world is futile.
Second, we can engage in denial. We can refuse to accept the new external reality. We can pretend that external changes are not as profound as they really are. We can deny that we have an internal model, or that it bears examination. When the world about us appears to be irrational, erratic, and irresponsible, it is all too easy to blame others for the unpleasant, destructive things we experience. It is equally easy to abandon meaning, engage in erratic behaviour, or retreat into fantasy. All such is also futile.
Third, we can attempt to understand and change our internal model of reality. That is the least common alternative, and for good reason. Changing an internal model of reality is extremely difficult, terrifying, and complex. It requires a meticulous, painful examination of beliefs. It requires a fundamental understanding of consciousness and how it must change. It destroys our sense of time and place. It calls into question our very identity. We can never be sure of our place, or our value, in a new order of things. We may lose sight of who and what we are.
Changing our internal model of reality requires an enormous act of faith, for it requires time to develop, and we require time to grow into it. Yet it is the only workable answer. We are not helpless victims in the grasp of some supernatural force. We were active participants in the creation of our present consciousness.
From that consciousness we created our present internal model of reality which is increasingly archaic. To change our internal model of reality will take time.
It will require great respect for the past, vast understanding and tolerance of the present, and even greater belief and trust in the future. It is an odyssey that calls out to the best among us, and the best within us, one and all.
No one should be condemned for failure to welcome change. It is a pervasive problem which plagues us all. Dostoevsky put it into perspective in the last century when he wrote: ‘Taking a new step, uttering a new word is what people fear most’.
The undeniable fact is that we have created the greatest explosion of capacity to receive, store, utilise, transform, and transmit information in history and that is causing an even greater explosion in societal diversity and complexity. There is no way to turn back. Whether we recognise it or not, whether we will it or not, whether we welcome it or not, we are caught up in the most profound change in the history of civilisation. If you think to perpetuate the old ways, try to recall the last time evolution rang your number to ask your consent.
Life is uncertainty, surprise, hate, wonder, speculation, love, joy, pain, mystery, beauty, and a thousand other things – some we can't even imagine. Control requires denial of life. Life is not about certainty or controlling. It's not about getting. It's not about having. It's not about knowing. It's not even about being. Life is eternal perpetual becoming or it is nothing. Becoming is not a thing to be known, commanded, or controlled. It is a magnificent, mysterious, odyssey to be experienced.
Aidan McCullen has lived a fascinating life of major change. In his book, Undisruptable, he brings us a method for making sense of the external world, and an accessible and visual approach to letting go of the past, and welcoming the future with a mindset of permanent reinvention. It is a timely, thoughtful book, well worth reading.
Dee Hock, founder and CEO Emeritus of VISA and author of One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization, November 2020.
Introduction: Why You Should Read This Book
It seemed as if time stood still as the ball spun towards me. I thought to myself, You did it man. You achieved your goal; you are in the starting line-up for one of the best teams in the world. I caught the ball, brushed off some would-be tacklers and made some ground. After the game, the coach, the club president and my new teammates congratulated me on a great performance. I was off to the dream start. Little did I know how that peak moment was the start of a steep decline. One year later, after multiple injuries, disappointments and setbacks, I joined a lesser club. Two years after that, I reached the end of the career I had built over a decade.
That same year, Forbes magazine ran a cover story entitled ‘One billion customers, can anyone catch the cell phone king?’ It was November 2007. Nokia's stock surged one hundred and fifty-five percent with a peak price of over forty dollars per share. Nokia was the largest mobile phone company in the world, dominating more than fifty percent of the global market. Two years later, the share price dropped below ten dollars per share. Eight years after that, shares plummeted below five dollars and Nokia offloaded its smartphone business to Microsoft. In the period of only six years, Nokia saw their market share slip from fifty percent in 2007 to three percent in 2013. A powerful business, built slowly over decades, faced a dramatic descent that lasted less than a decade.
My sports career and Nokia's fate share similar patterns common to disruption. The moment we reach the peak in any endeavour, the dip is already underway. The difficulty lies in recognising when we have reached the peak and what we can do to prevent the decline.
Looking back on my sports career, I can identify numerous things I might have done differently – one of the many benefits of hindsight. There is no doubt that Nokia's leadership identified many decisions they should have taken, or not as the case may be. Perhaps they should have paid more attention to the threat of the iPhone? They might have reinvented their business while they were on top? After all, they had developed a prototype smart phone and even conceptualised an app store, but decided to focus on updating the existing models that had made them successful in the first place. These are common ‘might have’ considerations we see with all disruption. Kodak might have prepared for a digital world like Fujifilm did. Microsoft might have entered the hardware business earlier. Blackberry might have diversified their portfolio.
Alas, therein lies the problem: our successes often blind us to the possibility of failure, our victories can sometimes defeat us. When organisations are at their most profitable, they are also at their most fragile. When individuals are at their most successful, we are also at our most vulnerable. We become so preoccupied with optimising, enjoying and defending the competitive advantage that made us successful today that we neglect to prepare for tomorrow. This mode of thinking is outdated. Too much has changed in the last two decades and will change at a faster pace in the coming years. We can no longer win with defence alone, there is no longer a safe harbour for organisations, there is no longer a career destination for individuals. Businesses and careers, like life, are about perpetual becoming, a permanent reinvention.
Happily for me, there was one major difference between Nokia's organisational fate and my professional rugby fate: I knew when the end was coming. Although those final years of my career were difficult, they afforded me ample time to prepare for the ambiguous future that awaits every sports person after retirement. I had time to explore burgeoning industries that I could enter. I had time to develop capabilities before I would need them and research which career paths would provide the greatest growth opportunities. I had no choice but to reinvent. After all, my career was over and I had nothing to lose. Nokia, on the other hand, had everything to lose.
That is so often the challenge: we resist reinvention for fear of losing the competitive advantage we have developed. The harder fought our successes, the stronger we defend them. Rather than diversify when they had sufficient revenue and resources to do so, Nokia held on tightly to what they had already created and ignored intensifying threats.
Once-dominant companies will experience the fate of Nokia with increasing frequency unless permanent reinvention becomes part of business as usual. The key, we will see, is to reinvent in permanence. We can no longer wait until we reach a stall point in our lifecycle to explore new possibilities – that is too late. We must build a constant flow of reinvention initiatives into business, careers and life.
Seventy-five percent of transformation programmes fail, highlighting that even when leaders recognise the need to reinvent, the status quo prevails. This failure rate is not exclusive to organisations. As the majority of us have experienced, as much as eighty percent of New Year's resolutions also fail. Even when we know new habits will benefit us greatly, we fail to adapt. Why is this, and how can we improve the odds?
My personal experience with reinvention, the lessons from a sporting career, coupled with various transformation roles, inspired me to seek answers. With a particular fascination with mindset, I researched widely the fields of neuroscience, organisational transformation, innovation, philosophy, epigenetics and human evolution to understand how we can succeed. This book is the culmination of a decade of this research and hundreds of interviews with some of the best minds on the planet.
My findings continuously point to a common trend: we cannot change what we do until we also change how we think. Within organisations this translates as: we cannot change business models until we also change mental models. Throughout the book, you will see this strong interconnection between individual change and organisational change, because they are symbiotic.
The underlying questions I pose are:
‘How do we navigate a world that is changing at breakneck speed, as business leaders, and as individuals?’
‘What can we do to minimise the impact of disruption on our careers, in our organisations and on our lives?’
The answer I propose lies with a mindset: a mindset of permanent reinvention.
What is the Permanent Reinvention Mindset?
Think back to when you had an eye test. Do you remember how the optometrist placed a contraption over your eyes and added a series of lenses to test your vision? That contraption is like a world view – the way we perceive the world, other people, and our overall philosophies of life. Every time we add a lens, it modifies how we experience the world. The difference between that contraption and a world view is that each time a new lens is added to our world view, the lenses remain in place. We must be vigilant about the lenses we admit, because they colour our view of the world, sometimes to our benefit and sometimes not. They can limit us, encourage us to seek confirming evidence, and make us hold on to mental models, business models and convictions even when they no longer serve us.
Figure 0.1 The Optometrist's contraption
In this analogy, the brain plays the role of the optometrist adding lenses as we learn and experience new things. Over time, the lenses amass to create a worldview unique to each one of us, and heavily influenced by those around us.
As we grow older, our lenses pile up through education and media, religion and politics, friends and foes, poverty and prosperity, society and culture and countless other ways. Psychologists tell us that by the time we reach age thirty-five, our behaviours, attitudes, beliefs, emotional reactions, habits, skills, associative memories, conditioned responses, and perceptions are subconsciously programmed within us. Although we collect and use many of these lenses subconsciously, we can be deliberate about updating them.
As we advance through life, our lenses become scratched and worn and distort our view, blinding us to both threats and opportunities. ‘Any real change’, novelist James Baldwin wrote, ‘implies the breakup of the world as one has always known it, the loss of all that gave one an identity, the end of safety’. Baldwin chose his words carefully. The ‘real change’ he mentions is transformational change, like a caterpillar becoming a butterfly. It is a change of state. This is the kind of change we must deliberately pursue. However, such change invokes resistance and involves letting go of the old self to make way for the new. Meaningful transformations involve a multitude of emotions, many obstacles and immense resistance from the status quo.
The purpose of this book is to offer a series of new lenses, to update our conceptual story of change as organisations and individuals. When we shift how we perceive the process of transformation, we can embrace it more fully. By recognising the common pitfalls, resistance and blockers to change, we become more at ease with the ambiguity that is synonymous with today's world.
As you read this book, consider each chapter as a new lens. Over the course of the book, the lenses compound to culminate with the permanent reinvention mindset.
Why Reinvent?
‘I can't think of any period in human history when people were really certain what to do, had no surprises and no unexpected developments. What is novel is not uncertainty; what is novel is a realization that uncertainty is here to stay…[Therefore], we are challenged with a task, which I think is unprecedented — and the task is to develop an art, to develop an art of living permanently with uncertainty.’
— Zygmunt Bauman
According to the Boston Consulting Group, the average life of a business model was once fifteen years. By their estimation, that number has drastically reduced to five years. A study released by Innosight, the Corporate Longevity Forecast, predicts the average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 list will continue to grow shorter and shorter over the next decade. Innosight reported that the thirty-three-year average tenure of companies on the S&P 500 in 1964 had narrowed to twenty-four by 2016. They forecast it will shrink to only twelve years by 2027. Further research, conducted by Credit Suisse, revealed that the average time a company spends in the Fortune 500 has diminished from sixty years to less than twenty. These studies show that, even when you become one of the most successful companies in the world, it may not last. The Covid-19 pandemic, and a plethora of societal shifts including artificial intelligence, digitisation and globalization, will greatly accelerate these downward spirals.
This reality does not escape the leaders of the world's most powerful organisations. Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos told employees at an all-hands meeting in May 2020 that Amazon is not ‘too big to fail’. Bezos was responding was to a question about the lessons he had learned from the bankruptcies of Sears and other victims of the retail apocalypse. His response is a warning for all of us to understand that disruption is part of the new reality. He said, ‘Amazon is not too big to fail. In fact, I predict one day Amazon will fail. Amazon will go bankrupt. If you look at large companies, their lifespans tend to be thirty-plus years, not a hundred-plus years’. When the CEO of one of the most successful organisations of all time and one of the richest men in the world says his company will not last, we should pay attention.
One of the challenges for so many organisations and individuals is that we have been educated and prepared for a steady and stable environment. The relative stability of the post-war period, an anomalous period in world history, has somewhat contributed to our conditioning for stability. Our mental and operational flexibility has atrophied.
