Foreword
Perhaps the most important question facing leaders today is this: How do you build an organization that performs flawlessly and evolves rapidly, one that delivers sterling results today and changes fast enough to be relevant tomorrow? There can be no either/or here. We live in a world that offers no refuge for mediocrity; a world in which competitors quickly and mercilessly exploit any operational weakness. We also live in an era of wrenching change: a world in which the future is less and less an extrapolation of the past. Thus what matters is not just an organization’s competitive advantage at a point in time, but its evolutionary advantage over time. Trouble is, most of us know a lot more about how to build an organization that can execute in the short run than we do about how to build one that has the health and vitality to thrive over the long term.
In most industries, it’s the newcomers that have been creating the lion’s share of new market value and new wealth. As the barriers that used to protect incumbents from the forces of creative destruction crumble and fall, once-great companies increasingly find themselves on the defensive. Turns out a lot of companies weren’t quite as invincible as they thought they were—and were overly dependent on customer ignorance, distribution monopolies, knowledge asymmetries, and other fast-disappearing sources of economic friction.
In this hyper-dynamic, hyper-competitive environment, every organization is either going forwards ...
