Shift Ahead: How the Best Companies Stay Relevant in a Fast-Changing World

by Allen Adamson, Joel Steckel Narrated by Tom Parks

Overview

The future is closer than you think.

In a world that's changing faster and more furiously than ever, the ability to shift focus is critical.

Why is it that some organizations can continually evolve to meet the times and the marketplace, and others can't? How do some businesses recognize the right moment to shift, and others, ruefully, only after it's too late? Packed with insightful interviews, Shift Ahead offers a smart, calculated approach to knowing when to change course and how to pull it off.

The book brings every internal and external factor into view: competitors, risks, culture, finances, and more. And it taps success stories and cautionary tales--including HBO, Adobe, BlackBerry, National Geographic, NYU, Microsoft, Kodak, and P&G--to explain how to:

• Spot warning signs that it's time for reinvention
• Overcome obstacles in the way of future goals
• Maintain authenticity when changing gears
• Execute a bold change seamlessly

To stay competitive, you must shift; to stay credible, you must focus. Shift Ahead turns this difficult maneuver into a straightforward strategy.

Editorial Reviews

From the Publisher

Why do some companies survive and grow in a quickly changing world, while other companies flail and fail? That’s the question [the authors] tackle in this down-to-earth and example-filled book.” —Legal Marketing Association

Product Details

BN ID:	2940169530766
Publisher:	Brilliance Audio
Publication date:	11/09/2017
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

Why This Book?

It's a good question. And a good part of the answer resides in the word relevant. To say something is "relevant" is to say that it matters. Being relevant has always been a critical factor for success in all walks of life. Writers and artists want their work to be relevant. Musicians want their music to be relevant. Filmmakers want their movies to be relevant to viewers. Scientists and researchers want their discoveries to be relevant. Teachers want their lessons to be relevant. We all want to believe we are relevant to our employers and to our partners. But, more germane to this book, businesses must continually ensure that they are relevant to their customers if they want to continue to stay in business. A central premise of this book is that to remain relevant, businesses must indisputably know why they matter to their customers.

That said, maintaining relevance in a world that is changing so very, very fast is very, very challenging. (Lest you doubt that the world is changing fast, when was the last time you got late-breaking news from an actual newspaper versus a media app or Twitter feed, took a picture with a camera instead of a phone, thought there was no possibility for a self-driving car, sent your resume through the mail rather than posting it on the cloud, or watched a television show at the time it actually aired?)

The ability to stay relevant is being significantly challenged by the accelerating pace of change—and new ways of doing things—that are emerging with every passing day.

As Thomas L. Friedman, award-winning author and columnist for the New York Times told us, the planet's three largest forces—Moore's Law (technology), the Market (globalization), and Mother Nature (climate change and biodiversity loss)—are accelerating all at once, transforming five key realms: the workplace, politics, geopolitics, ethics, and community.

"When change is happening at five miles per hour, if you get off track it's not that big a deal, because how far off track can you get? But when change is happening at 500 miles per hour, a small error in navigation can have a huge effect. If you don't start every day by asking, What world am I living in? What are the biggest drivers in the world? What are the biggest drivers shaping more things and places?, you won't get the proper diagnoses. This really matters more than ever," Friedman told us when we spoke. "These three forces aren't just changing the world; they're fundamentally reshaping everything. And I would say that, as such, they require massive innovation in both business and 
 society. Change is happening at a compound rate and innovation has to happen at a compound rate in these other realms. That's the main argument in my book [Thank You for Being Late]. Either we align ourselves with these drivers to shape the world to get the most out of them or not. That said, I would also say you need to build off that solid foundation."

Breakthroughs in science, data analysis, healthcare, media, and education are occurring at compounded rates of speed. The way we bank, secure our homes, get our entertainment, measure the effect of our exercise regimens, acquire information, share information, buy our food, use energy to run our households, and perform almost every other daily activity is changing literally before our eyes and during our lifetimes. The ongoing transformations in the way technology works, businesses work, and almost everything else in the world works is having a major impact on how we work, plan, decide, think, and live.

It was with this idea in mind that we set out to write Shift Ahead. It is based on our hands-on experience, our academic research, and most significant, our more than 100 interviews with senior management and category experts from a wide spectrum of applicable fields. We wrote Shift Ahead to document how the smartest companies and organizations shift their strategies in order to stay relevant in the face of the swift and exponential changes in everything from technology to the forces of globalization, from politics to culture, from consumer tastes to human behavior. We wanted to find out how they shift ahead—how they stayed ahead of the curve, the competition, and the evolving requirements of their customers—given the barrage of evolving challenges.

We also wanted to clarify how businesses and organizations shifted the focus of their endeavors without losing focus on what they stand for in the minds of consumers. As marketing professionals, we know that in a world as trans-parent and skeptical as this one, authenticity has taken on far greater significance. We found in case after case that staying connected to your organizational DNA, staying true to your "true north" as you shift ahead is critical for credibility. Firms that shift ahead, but without maintaining a focus on who they are, do so at their own peril.

One goal of this book is to distill the experiences of over 100 companies through the lenses of our diverse practical and academic backgrounds to provide usable and, yes, relevant lessons learned on how to stay relevant in this frenetic world. We want these lessons to be as applicable to small start-ups and nonprofits as they are to multinational organizations. We want them to be as beneficial for brick-and-mortar establishments as they are for online enterprises. With a minimal amount of buzzwords and jargon, and with a wealth of, again, relevant examples, Shift Ahead demonstrates how organizations across a wide range of categories effectively and efficiently shift gears, shift direction, but always with the intention of shifting ahead, so as to continue to matter in a meaningfully different way to those they serve.

Excerpted from SHIFT AHEAD: How the Best Companies Stay Relevant in a Fast-Changing World by Allen Adamson and Joel Steckel. Copyright © 2018 Allen Adamson and Joel Steckel. Published by AMACOM Books, a division of American Management Association, New York, NY. Used with permission.

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