Survival Is Not Enough

Just in case you weren't paying attention: We live in turbulent times. In five months, Napster went from having 1 million to 10 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 markets -- is 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 usual. It's a new principle that is going to feel unnatural at first. We will need a new vocabulary just to discuss it. We will need to reinvent what it means to lead or to work in an organization.

The Evolution Alternative

Evolution -- defined as inheritable modifications over many generations -- is the most powerful tool we have for dealing with change. Individuals and companies can put this organic process to use by permitting change to occur, by not fighting it. A mutation is a mistake or a random feature that is created when a gene, or an idea, is altered and then transferred. By finding positive mutations and incorporating successful new techniques into a company's makeup, organizations can defeat their slower competitors.

It is our fear of changing a winning strategy and our reliance on command-and-control tactics that make us miserable -- not change. Change doesn't have to be the enemy. We start bypassing our fear of change by constantly training people to make small changes. I call this "zooming." Then we can build a company that zooms and attracts zoomers. As the company gathers steam, it will distance itself from its competitors and dominate markets by embracing the changes that will inevitably come.

Denying Evolution Doesn't Make It Go Away

The simple engine of evolution -- inheritable changes in the species occurring over thousands of generations -- can produce extraordinary results. No factory has ever produced anything as marvelous as the bird, yet birds evolved from a simple single-celled organism, one step at a time.

Charles Darwin felt that people have trouble visualizing anything that took place over the course of a hundred million years. These days, in a world where McDonald's aims to provide you with food in less than 60 seconds, it may be even harder for people to make the leap.

Business is now at a turning point. Memetic evolution -- evolution caused by memes, or ideas or units of innovation -- is driving our companies to change faster and faster. Yet most managers and CEOs do everything they can to keep their companies from evolving. They deny that evolution is a powerful force for change and rarely consider how it might actually help them compete.

Companies, from Kinko's to Starbucks to Viacom, almost never follow a master plan to success. Instead, they morph and grow and change until they become successful. And then such companies willfully stop evolving. Like most successful companies, they create roadblocks designed to slow evolution. They write policies and form committees. They invest in factories and the people who run them. These are universal roadblocks to evolution, and they are built into the fabric of the organization.