IN A 24/7 MEDIA WORLD, THE HYPE IS CHANGE
On August 8, 2006, Amazon.com listed 56,170 book titles under change, 11,195 titles under business change, and 2,404 titles under global change. An uncountable number of newspapers, magazines, and 24-hour news channels leave not one stone unturned, promoting the idea that everything is changing. Now, who in the world can keep up with this? No one can.
Don’t bother.
Think about it: Most businesses stay in a steady state, day in and day out, year in and year out. Yes, products and markets have been altered, mostly for the better, and the tools we use have changed. But despite the avalanche of business books, business practices—the basics of buying and selling, of making a profit as a necessary condition of survival—have remained much the same during my 40 years of involvement.
Whether cell phones can display television and calls are made via the Internet, your bathtub filled by taking off your clothes, or your refrigerator opened by a rumble in your stomach, these are just other ways of doing what we do—easier, faster, farther, more, and longer—and not the substance of our lives. We go to school, get married, and have kids and send them to school, which, God knows, does not change despite the chanting for school reform. Home, family, and work are the great constants.
Life on a sugar beet farm has not changed too much since my boyhood. As ever, the seasons determine the rhythm of life, although modern equipment has eased sowing and harvesting. Most of the farmers still raise chickens and keep farm animals, only the horses in my time used for transport and work are more often kept for leisure and delight. In the ups and downs of life my parents were trying to make their living, educate their children as best they could, all in the frame of their potential and with the tools of their time.
At the beginning of their 11-volume Story of Civilization, Will and Ariel Durant say:
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WHAT AND HOW
Have you ever made a list of what changes or is likely to change? Hold on—not a list of how we do things, but what we do.
Returning to farming, what has changed is how agriculture is practiced. Advancement is dependent on how flexible farmers adapt their skills to new technologies and changing consumer behavior. But farmers stay what they are, farmers, although there are differences in how they farm. Some find their niche, adapting to changing demands in the market, like Chino’s, whose delicate organic vegetables and fruits are flown to celebrity cooks like Wolfgang Puck in Los Angeles. Others, for various reasons, have not made it and have given up farming.
Most change is not in what we do, but how we do it. Within all the hype, the more we are able to differentiate between constants and change, the more effectively we will be able to react to new markets and profit from change.
Sports are a good example.
The rules of team sports remain fairly constant—with only very small changes from time to time. The changes we do make often come from a change in the way players play their game. A well-known big change was the popularization of the modern forward pass in football by Knute Rockne in the 1920s. The goal was still to get a touchdown, but how players could get to the goal line changed.
Occasionally an individual player’s style will change a game.
On the night of December 30, 1936, a crowd of more than 17,500 turned out at the old Madison Square Garden in New York City, to see Long Island University, the nation’s number-one basketball team with a 43-game winning streak, oppose Stanford, the defending Pacific Coast Conference champion. Stanford ended LIU’s winning streak with a 45–31 victory, but something more important happened.
The crowd in fact had mostly come to see Hank Luisetti, Stanford’s 6 foot 2 inch, 185-pound sophomore. He was the only player known for shooting the ball with one hand while he hung in the air, in defiance of basketball style. Everyone else was shooting the old style: two-handed set shots or hook shots. The huge publicity celebrating Luisetti’s shooting style did not change that the goal was putting the ball into the basket, but it forever changed how the game was played. But not without stubborn resistance. The establishment felt it was not the right thing to do. “That’s not basketball,” Nat Holman, the fabled City College of New York coach, said at the time. “If my boys ever shot one-handed, I’d quit coaching.”
Luisetti was voted college player of the year in 1937 and 1938. He finished second to George Mikan in the Associated Press’s poll to select the best player of the first half of the twentieth century.
Hank Luisetti died on December 17, 2002, living plenty long enough to see his style perfected and embellished by the likes of Earl Monroe, Julius Erving, and, of course, Michael Jordan.
A change in techniques often opens a door to a wider potential. American track-and-field athlete Dick Fosbury literally developed a jump into a new era. Instead of leaping facing the bar and swinging first one leg and then the other over the bar, Fosbury turned just as he leaped, flinging his body backward over the bar with his back arched and his legs following, landing on his shoulders. Fosbury, a high school student in Medford, Oregon, started to high-jump using the straddle method he learned from his coaches, but his performance was rather mediocre until he started to look for his own way. He did not think about the traditional school of jumping, not about form. “I don’t even think about the high jump,” he said. “It’s positive thinking. I just let it happen.”
At the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico, his head-first technique of jumping captivated the audience when he cleared every height up to 7 feet 31/4 inches. With 7 feet 41/4 inches on his third attempt, Fosbury set a new Olympic record and won the gold medal.
The sudden progress in high jumping was not based only on this new technique. The new technique was made possible by a change in the landing area, from sandpit to large rubber beds, allowing a head-first jumper a landing without killing himself. Although the sport itself had not changed, Fosbury’s innovative style, the Fosbury flop, became the universal method.
THE HIGH MORTALITY OF CHANGE
So often we hear and read that “the only certainty is change.” There is an upside and a downside to this. The upside is on the side of the change management consultants. The downside is that people are driven into hysteria about the omnipresence of change. In the late 1990s e-commerce was to change everything. Sell all your stock in retail chains; forget bricks-and-mortar.
Fashion, one would think, is all about change. Most of fashion, I would say, is a parade of fads. But there are many constants in the fashion world, and I don’t mean the little black dress. A constant of more than 150 years is jeans, which were “Levi’s” for about 100 years until the options increased. Now every designer has his or her jeans version coming and going.
A constant joy in men’s fashion is its constancy. Don’t try to introduce something new. This market, unlike women’s fashions, hardly ever changes, and if it does only slightly. In my experience over the years, just about the only change has been the width of men’s ties—every 20 years. More things are like men’s fashions than women’s fashions.
As the caprices of women’s fashions change, so do the fragrances enveloping them. Their life span often is as elusive as their fragrance. Of 100 new fragrances, 95 fully vaporize. But more keep being produced because the markup is so high that if you are one of the 5 survivors, it’s great. The big change in fashion is that it has become increasingly interwoven with art and architecture, turning it into a whole new experience of visual art. You will read about the many faces of the new visual art world in Chapter 1.
In November 2005, Coca-Cola announced that it was pulling the plug on Vanilla Coke, joining the long list of new products that die an early death. Of the 30,000 new customer products launched each year, more than 90 percent expire. “We are doing just fine with what we have” seems to be the response of consumers. The importance of continuity was highlighted in Built to Last, the 1994 book by Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, in which they debunked the “myth of change.” “A visionary company almost religiously preserves its core ideology, changing it seldom, if ever,” they wrote. “Core values in a visionary company form a rock-solid foundation and do not drift with the trends and fashions of the day.”
In business, as in sports, new techniques sometimes introduce a new constancy. “Process management” took off in the United States in the 1980s, triggered by the threat of the Japanese taking over the world, and with its star methodology, Six Sigma, pioneered by Bill Smith at Motorola, became the new universal truth for quality improvement. Now its great champion, GE’s Jack Welch, has retired, and it is beginning to run out of gas, as it is now being seen by many as a hindrance to creativity. But it has been in play for 25 years.
EVERYTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN?
Long gone are the days when King Solomon (3000 BC) wrote his famous words: “That which has come to be, that is what will come to be; and that which has been done, that is what will be done; and so there is nothing new under the sun.”
Now everything is said to be new under the sun.
Early in 2005 Newsweek started running a widely placed advertisement with an extraordinary quote by its gifted international editor, Fareed Zakaria: “The 21st century will be the century of change. More things will change in more places in the next 10 years than in the previous 100. Most countries aren’t ready for this dizzying ride—certainly not the United States of America.”
No wonder reading statements like this make us focus on the future, desperately seeking the horizon for the next sign of change, each little cloud a possible sign of a thunderstorm. Fareed Zakaria might be able to look beyond the horizon, seeing more than any one of us. But surely no quantitative studies were made: Adding up all the changes during the previous 100 years is daunting enough, but it is not possible to now list the number of things that “will change in more places in the next 10 years.” It is an attention-getting statement in the fog of speculation. To me it is impressionistic and not helpful. Better to make your list of what you think will change in the next 10 years and what you think is likely to remain constant. The good news is that “the only constancy is change” is both ubiquitous and ridiculous. My bottom line is that “the only certainty in business is change” is just not true.
THE DNA OF CHANGE SPIRALS AROUND THE PILLARS OF CONSTANCY.
Change is the nourishment of the media. Its appetite is fed by competition and 24/7 reporting: the relevance of an event is mostly the event itself, its quality and significance depending on the supply and easily gliding into triviality and irrelevance.
A common purpose of the 11 Mindsets in this book is to not get lost in the nonessential, but instead to focus on the things that have and will have the strongest influence on our lives.
Most of us are not hunting for news and change, but for orientation into the future, for clarity in a confusing world. Not quantity but quality is decisive. Whatever information is assailing you, distinguish between real and apparent change, basic shifts and fads, remembering that in the history of the world, most things remain constant.
Differentiate between
Basics and embellishment
Rules and techniques
Trends and fads
Breakthroughs and refinements
