Survival Is Not Enough

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.

• Foreword, by Charles Darwin
• Introduction: More Than Survival
• The Paul Orfalea Story: A Process, Not a Plan
• Survival Is Not Enough: The Summary
• Chapter 1 Change
• Guillotine or Rack?
• Frantic at Work?
• Businesses That Don't Change Are in Danger
• Change Is the New Normal
• What Happens When the Jaguars Die?
• The Problem with Factories
• What's the Internet Got to Do with the Chaos?
• Successful Businesses Hate Change
• The Promise of Positive Feedback Loops and Runaway
• Runaway Can't Last Forever — Nothing Does
• The Best Form of Runaway Is the Least Obvious
• The Evolution Alternative
• Chapter 2 What Every CEO Needs to Know About
• Evolution
• Competition Drives Change
• The Big Ideas
• What's a Meme?
• Memes Are Not the Same As Genes
• Periodicity in Memes
• Genes versus Memes
• Denying Evolution Doesn't Make It Go Away
• Chapter 3 Fear and Zooming
• Four Reasons People Freeze in the Face of Change
• The First Barrier to Change: Committees
• The Second Barrier to Change: Critics
• Market Leaders Are Afraid of Failing
• Change Equals Death
• Why Change Management Doesn't Work
• The Way to Build an Organization That Can Embrace Change Is to Redefine Change
• Chapter 4 Do You Zoom?
• Start Zooming Before the Crisis Comes
• What About the Creative Corporation?
• Zoom First and Ask Questions Later
• Comparing Zooming to Re-engineering
• Avoid the Dragon, Don't Slay It
• Which Sort of Pain Are You Going to Feel?
• Chapter 5 Your Company Has mDNA
• The Vocabulary of Genes and Memes in Nature and at Work
• The Power of the Metaphor
• Why Evolution Works
• Companies Evolve
• Evolution from the Ground Up
• The Red Queen Goes to Work
• One Good Reason That CEOs Reject Evolution as an Alternative — and Why They're Wrong
• CEOs Enjoy Picking Lottery Numbers
• Evolution at Wal-Mart
• Natural Selection and Artificial Selection
• Runaway Times Ten
• Is Incremental Change Enough?
• Chapter 6 Winning Strategies, Getting Unstuck and Sex
• Typing in France
• The Winning Strategy
• The Stuck Winning Strategy
• Competent People Embrace the Current Winning Strategy
• Piling On to the New Winning Strategy
• Extinction as a Way of Life
• Sexual Selection at Work
• Six Ways Companies Can Use Signaling Strategies
• Your Most Important Sex Is with Your Boss
• Embracing New mDNA
• Sex Is Important
• Artificially Selecting the mDNA in Your Company (aka Firing People)
• Choose Your Customers, Choose Your Future
• Chapter 7 Serfs, Farmers, Hunters and Wizards
• The Danger of Role Models
• Amazon Tweaks and Tests While Wal-Mart Struggles
• Wizards, Hunters, Farmers and Serfs
• The Life of a Serf
• Why Do Companies Hire Serfs?
• The End of the Serf Era
• Transforming Serfs into Farmers
• Let Some of the Serfs Work Somewhere Else
• Farmers Know How to Tweak
• Amazon Knows How to Farm
• QVC Outfarms Amazon
• Think Like a Waiter
• Hunters Don't Own Land
• AOL Knows How to Hunt
• Fast Feedback Loops for Hunters
• Plenty of Companies Have No Clue How to Hunt
• Choose Your Employees, Choose Your Future
• Wizards Invent
• In Defense of Slack
• Chapter 8 The Basic Building Block Is People
• It Starts and Ends with the Individual
• Changing Your Personal mDNA: Bad News from My Sister
• Find a Great Boss
• If You Want the Soup, Order the Soup
• Starting Down the Road to the Zooming Organization
• The Best Way to Stop Your Company from Zooming
• The Zooming Club
• A Quick Lesson in Avoiding the Acquisition Trap
• Chapter 9 Why It Works Now: Fast Feedback and Cheap Projects
• Fast Feedback Loops
• The Power of the Obligating Question
• Linux Is Cool — But It's Not What You Think
• Technology and Fast Feedback Loops
• I'll Know It When I See It — The Power of Prototypes
• A Prototyping Pitfall
• Data Is Not Information — Keeping the Promise of IT
• Putting a Man on the Moon
• A Broken Feedback Loop
• Implementing Hotwash
• Plan for Success…and Plan for Failure
• Chapter 10 Tactics for Accelerating Evolution
• Cherish the Charrette
• Animals Evolve on a Regular Schedule
• Bring Back Model Years
• Alternate the Teams that Work on New Models
• Better Beats Perfect
• Slow Down Is Not the Opposite of Hurry Up
• What to Do If Your People Get Stuck
• One Thing Worth Stealing from the Supermarket
• The Eternal Web Page
• Everybody Brainstorms
• The Suggestion Box Is Not Dead
• Take the Dumpster Test
• Living with Broken Windows
• Let's Test It!
• Should There Be a Statute of Limitations on mDNA?
• Does Chaos Outside Mean Chaos Inside?
• Focus Is No Longer Sufficient
• Bringing It All Together: Decision Time at Environmental Defense
• The Über Strategy?
• The Important Questions
• Why?
• How do you respond to small, irrelevant changes?
• How many people have to say "yes" to a significant change?
• Do you have multiple projects in development that bet on conflicting sides of a possible outcome?
• Are you building the five elements of an evolving organization?
• Are you investing in techniques that encourage fast memetic evolution?
• What does someone need to do to get fired?
• Who are the three most powerful people standing between things that need to change and actual action by your company?
• What if you fired those people?
• What's your company's winning strategy?
• Is each manager required to have her staff spend a portion of their time on creating the future?
• Are you (personally) a serf, a farmer, a hunter or a wizard?
• What about the people you work with every day?
• If you quit your job today, could you get a decent job as a farmer or a hunter?
• If you could hire anyone in the world to help your company, who would it be?
• What's stopping you from hiring someone that good?
• 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?
• How can your company dramatically lower the cost of launching a test?
• Are there five areas in your company that would benefit from fast feedback loops?
• Are you building all your systems around testing and ignorance?
• Are you hiding from the market?
• Have you ever tried sushi?
• If you could acquire another company's mDNA, whose would you choose?
• Why don't you do that?
• Are the economies of scale really as big as you think they are?
• Is this project going to benefit from the learning it creates?
• In what markets could your marketing efforts enter runaway?
• How much time does senior management spend with unhappy customers?
• What do you do with complaint letters?
• What are you measuring?
• Are you being selfish with your personal mDNA?
• Have you institutionalized the process of sharing what you learn?
• Are you focusing too much?
• Are you the first choice among job seekers who have the mDNA you seek?
• Are you the first choice among employers that have the winning strategy you seek?
• What do you need to do to become the first choice?
• Do you zoom?

Seth tries to teach us that we need to be nimble and adaptable. Nothing new here, but he does it in a very enjoyable way and very convincing. Worth reading.