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.

Seth Godin, one of the world's most original thinkers, offers us a manifesto for perpetual change and growth. Embrace change — inject a proclivity for change into your organizational gene pool — or die. That is...ZOOM! It's a landmark effort, equally valuable for individuals and enterprises.

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

NaturalSelection 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 manypeople 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 thefuture 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?

Glossary

Author's Note

More

Acknowledgments

Index