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Hey, it's a jungle out there!
So if you want to win, do more than embrace change
learn how to evolve.
In five months, Napster went from having 1 million to to million users. Eleven months later, it had 80 million users-the most successful technology introduction of all time. And then it essentially went out of business. (Now it's back again-maybe.)
Some of the most popular shows on network TV are in formats that didn't even broadcast in prime time three years ago.
The price paid by marketers for Web traffic dropped as much as 99% in a 99-day period.
Last year, 17,000 new grocery products were introduced. Yet the average grocery store stocks only 30,000 items.
Is there any question as to what's going on here?
SUCCESSFUL BUSINESSES HATE CHANGE
Everything in our world-from marketing to technology to distribution to capital marketsis changing faster than ever (and not always in the same direction). Yet most companies are clueless about what's causing the change, how it might affect them, and, most important, what to do about it. Successful businesses hate change. People with great jobs hate change. Market leaders seek out and cherish dependable systems.
But upstarts and entrepreneurs love change. Turbulence scrambles the pieces on the game board; entrepreneurs get a chance to gain market share and profits. And since there are always more competitors than market leaders, there's a huge demand for change. More innovation[ More competition! More change! It won't go away. It will only get worse.
Stable times force us to think of our companies as machines. They are finely tuned and easy to copy, scale, and own. We build machines on an assembly line, focusing on how to make them cheaper and ever more reliable. If your company is a machine, you can control it. You can build another one, a bigger one. You can staff it with machine operators and train them to run it faster and faster.
In times of change, this model is wrong. Our organizations are not independent machines, standing in the middle of a stable field. Instead, we work for companies that are organisms. Living, breathing, changing organisms that interact with millions of other living, breathing, changing organisms.
This is not business as...