In 2018, Steve Blank wrote a piece in Harvard Business Review questioning the viability of the “lean startup” model. Given that Steve had pioneered lean startup techniques, I was intrigued. Why would he, all of a sudden begin, to doubt an idea that had been so successful and, to me at least, still seemed so relevant, even for large enterprises.
As it turned out, what made Steve hesitate was a new venture called “New TV” that was headed up by the dream team of legendary Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and star Silicon Valley CEO Meg Whitman. Beyond talent and cache, it had raised almost $2 billion. With that much money, how could it lose?
Now we know. The venture, which eventually came to be known as “Quibi,” recently announced it was shutting down, less than seven months after its product launch. It’s become an all too familiar tale. Multi-billion dollar washouts, including WeWork,Better Place and others, have become all too common. We need to learn from their mistakes.
Techno-optimism may have reached its zenith in 2011, when Marc Andreessen declared that software was eating the world. Back then, it seemed that anything rooted in the physical world was doomed to decline while geeky engineers banging out endless lines of code would own the future and everything in it.
Yet as Derek Thompson pointed out in The Atlantic, the euphoria of Andreessen and his Silicon Valley brethren seems to have been misplaced. A rash of former unicorns have seen their value plummet, while WeWork saw its IPO self-destruct. Today, even Internet giants like Amazon seem to be investing more in atoms than they do in bits.
I still remember the feeling of triumph I felt in the winter of 2005, in the aftermath of the Orange Revolution in Ukraine. During the fall, we readied ourselves for what proved to be a falsified election. In November, when the fraudulent results were announced, we took to the streets and the demonstrations lasted until new elections were called in January.
We had won, or so we thought. Our preferred candidate was elected and it seemed like a new era had dawned. Yet soon it became clear that things were not going well. Planned reforms stalled in a morass of corruption and incompetence. In 2010, Victor Yanukovych, the same man we marched against, rose to the presidency.
The pattern repeats with almost metronomic regularity. Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak was ousted in the Arab Spring, only to be replaced by the equally authoritarian Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. George W. Bush gave way to Barack Obama, who set the stage for Donald Trump. Revolutions sow the seeds for their own demise. We need to learn to break the cycle.
In 2014, when Silicon Valley was still largely seen as purely a force for good, George Packer wrote in The New Yorker how tech entrepreneurs tended to see politics through the lens of an engineering mindset. Their first instinct was to treat every problem as if it could be reduced down to discrete variables and solved like an equation.
Despite its romantic illusions, the digital zeitgeist merely echoed more than a century of failed attempts to generalize engineering approaches, such as scientific management, financial engineering, six sigma and shareholder value. All showed initial promise and then disappointed, in some cases catastrophically.
Proponents of the engineering mindset tend to blame its failures on poor execution. Surely, logic would suggest that as long as a set of principles are internally consistent they should be externally relevant. Yet the problem is that reality is not simple and clear-cut, but complex and nonlinear, which is why we need be ready to adapt to the unexpected and nonsensical.
You would think that the rise of progressive politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be responsible for the decline in the power of capitalism and the demise of free markets. However, a new book by NYU finance professor Thomas Philippon, called The Great Reversal, argues exactly the opposite.
In fact, he shows through meticulous research how capitalists themselves are killing capitalism. Through the charade of “pro-business” policies, industry leaders have been increasing regulation and limiting competition over the past 20 years. We need to right the ship and return to an embrace of free markets, entrepreneurship and innovation.
The industrial revolution of the 18th century was a major turning point. Steam power, along with other advances in areas like machine tools and chemistry transformed industry from the work of craftsmen and physical labor to that of managing machines. For the first time in world history, living standards grew consistently.
Yet during the 20th century, all of that technology needed to be rethought. Steam engines gave way to electric motors and internal combustion engines. The green revolution and antibiotics transformed agriculture and medicine. In the latter part of the century digital technology created a new economy based on information.
Today, we are on the brink of a new era of innovation in which we will need to rethink technology once again. Much like a century ago, we are developing new, far more powerful technologies that will change how we organize work, identify problems and collaborate to solve them. We will have to change how we compete and even redefine prosperity itself.
I first became interested in transformation in the fall of 2004. I was managing a leading news organization in Kyiv, Ukraine when the Orange Revolution broke out. It was an amazing thing to witness and experience. Seemingly overnight, a habitually dormant populace suddenly rose up and demanded change.
One of the things that struck me at the time is how no one really knew what was going on or what would happen next—not the journalists I spoke to in the newsroom everyday, not the other business leaders and certainly not the political leaders. Anyone with any conventional form of power seemed to have completely lost their ability to shape events.
That’s what started me on my 15 year-long journey to understand how transformation works that led to my book, Cascades. What I found was that many traditional notions about change management are not only wrong, they can actually kill a transformational effort even before it really starts. Here are five myths that you need to avoid if you want to bring change about.
16 year-old girl Gracie Cunningham created a firestorm recently when she posted a video to TikTok asking “is math real?” More specifically, she wanted to know why ancient mathematicians came up with algebraic concepts such as “y=mx+b.” “What would you need it for?” she asked, when they didn’t even have plumbing.
The video went viral on twitter, gathering millions of views and the social media universe immediately pounced, with many ridiculing how stupid it was. Mathematicians and scientists, however, felt otherwise and remarked how profound her questions were. Cornell’s Steve Strogatz even sent her a thoughtful answer to her question
We often overlook the value of simple questions, because we think intelligence has something to do with ability to recite rote facts. Yet intellect is not about knowing all the answers, but in asking better questions. That’s how we expand knowledge and gain deeper understanding. In fact, the most profound answers often come from seemingly silly questions.
The world today just seems to move faster and faster all the time. From artificial intelligence and self-driving cars to gene editing and blockchain, it seems like every time you turn around, there’s some newfangled thing that promises to transform our lives and disrupt our businesses.
Yet a paper published by a team of researchers in Harvard Business Review argues that things aren’t as they appear. They point out that total factor productivity growth has been depressed since 1970 and that recent innovations, despite all the hype surrounding them, haven’t produced nearly the impact of those earlier in the 20th century.
The truth is that the digital revolution has been a big disappointment and, more broadly, technology and globalization have failed us. However, the answer won’t be found in snazzier gadgets or some fabulous “Golden Era” of innovation of years long past. Rather we need to continually innovate how we innovate to solve problems that are relevant to our future.
“I hate consensus,” legendary Silicon Valley coach Bill Campbell used to growl. The problem, as the authors explain in the book, Trillion Dollar Coach, wasn’t that he didn’t want people to get along, but that an easy consensus often leads to groupthink and inferior decisions. It’s often just easier to fall in line than to engage in vigorous debate.
Research bears this out. In one study where college students were asked to solve a murder mystery, homogenous groups that formed an easy consensus felt more successful, but actually performed worse than more diverse teams that argued and voiced different viewpoints. When everybody agrees, nobody questions.
Make no mistake. If an idea is big enough, some people aren’t going to like it. Some will argue against it passionately and others may even try and actively undermine it. Yet rather than working to silence those voices, we need to learn to bring them to the fore. That’s how we can test our assumptions, consider other alternatives and, ultimately, come up with better ideas.
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