Today's Reading

Over my more than forty-year career in the technology industry, I've had a front-row-center seat to changes in the tech world. I've seen groundbreaking new ideas come to life, including some that seemed groundbreaking at the time but eventually flopped. I've gotten to know tech industry founders and CEOs, and watched retailers like Blockbuster, Bed Bath & Beyond, Circuit City, Fry's, RadioShack, and Sears grow to dominate their industries—at least for a time—only to shrink as consumer needs and wants changed or challengers introduced better business models. I've seen major companies like Atari, Eastman Kodak, Monster, RCA, and Sega peak and then descend to licensed names.

On a more positive note, I've seen countless companies and the executives who lead them show that they have the foresight and the capacity to challenge staid business practices. In the face of rapidly changing technology and a rapidly evolving world, they've been able to avoid irrelevance and reinvent themselves.

As humans, we naturally resist change. We like the status quo. The present we live in seems more comfortable and safer than the unknowns of the future. In fact, for most of us it's actually hardwired into our brains. We owe that tendency to the amygdala, the part of our brain that interprets changes in our environment as a potential threat, triggering the infamous "fight or flight" reflex.

While it may have had an evolutionary advantage, this resistance to change often serves us badly in the modern world. Things change! And we either adapt, or we wither. If that's true for individuals, it's doubly true for businesses. In business, if you stand still and don't change, the odds are high that some competitor will make your products or services cheaper, better, or more interesting.

Failure can also be a powerful driver for pivoting. In the United States, we appreciate failure more (or, depending on how you think about it, stigmatize failure less) than most other countries, because we recognize that we learn more from our failures than we do our successes. The people who can do this with humility and curiosity are the ones who will succeed.

In two earlier books, I called these people "ninjas." Ninjas were ancient Japanese warriors who often won their battles despite being outmanned and outgunned. They used cunning, skills, and unconventional means to accomplish their objectives. They recruited warriors with different skills, worked as a team, and adjusted quickly to new conditions. When confronted with a problem, they had a remarkable ability to think fast and find a solution.

Today's ninjas don't just win on the battlefield. Ninjas are master pivoters. They focus on the big goal, and they're not wedded to the steps it takes to reach it; they're open to exploring multiple paths. They are passionate, committed, and motivated. They seek out those with diverse experiences and skills to build effective and impactful teams. Modern-day ninjas problem solve in the boardroom, innovate in sourcing and supply chains, and outmaneuver in the market.

Not every pivot works, and that's okay. During COVID, with air travel limited and hospitals in cities like New York soon overrun with patients, Mal had an idea for repurposing unused commercial airplanes with hospital-grade air-filtration systems as surplus hospital units. We floated the idea by Delta Air Lines CEO Ed Bastian, who liked it enough to assign an internal team to work on feasibility. We tapped connections at the American Hospital Association and elsewhere to explore the idea. Thankfully, more effective treatments for COVID meant that cities didn't need as many remote hospital facilities as predicted. But it was the "miss every shot you don't take" type of thinking we felt the nation needed to confront the breadth of the pandemic.

Of course, that kind of thinking isn't new. In the late 1970s, a man named Sheldon Adelson created a series of smaller businesses before hitting on his first big success with a Las Vegas business event for computer dealers. That tradeshow, COMDEX, quickly grew into the world's largest business event, which he later sold for almost $1 billion. He took that money, pivoted, and put it into an old hotel, remodeling the property into a huge hotel and convention center complex, now called the Venetian—one of the most popular venues on the Las Vegas strip. The Venetian, along with other hotels he built globally, made Shelly, as he was known to friends, one of the wealthiest people in America.

In this book, we'll explore pivots that reshaped the consumer technology industry and our world. Some worked, some didn't. Some you may have heard of; others have flown under the radar but introduced major shifts in our society. We'll explore the pivots that are underway in technology and business, and the political and policy pivots that are needed to protect the "secret sauce" that is American innovation.
...

Join the Library's Online Book Clubs and start receiving chapters from popular books in your daily email. Every day, Monday through Friday, we'll send you a portion of a book that takes only five minutes to read. Each Monday we begin a new book and by Friday you will have the chance to read 2 or 3 chapters, enough to know if it's a book you want to finish. You can read a wide variety of books including fiction, nonfiction, romance, business, teen and mystery books. Just give us your email address and five minutes a day, and we'll give you an exciting world of reading.

What our readers think...