Book Summary Preview : Survival Is Not Enough

The Big Idea

• Change is the new normal.
• Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution can be applied as a metaphor for businesses.
• Only companies that zoom, or learn to adapt and evolve constantly will survive.
• Companies that don’t evolve and make change a normal thing are signing up for their own extinction.
• Genes take longer to change over time. Memes, or new ideas, spread at a much faster rate than genes.
• Zooming is about constant change, for no particular reason, and with no particular goal.
• Zooming is less painful. You gradually breed a new kind of species, instead of forcing one to make a big traumatic change.
• Zooming is about stretching your limits by adapting to new ideas, opportunities, and challenges without triggering our inherent human change-avoidance reflex.
• Zooming is about adapting small changes over time.
• You can practice zooming in everyday life: change your office layout, eat in a different restaurant every weekend, listening to a new CD everyday, read a magazine you’ve never read before, or just do something for the first time, as often as possible.
• Normal can be an environment where new memes appear on a regular basis.
• Companies that zoom do the same thing but try something just a little bit differently each time.

Based on the Theory of Evolution by Charles Darwin

Species change slowly in a graduated manner over time. It follows that any being will have a better chance of survival if it modifies its form in a manner profitable to itself.

Applied to business in our fast times, companies that can evolve slowly and constantly will triumph.

Applying Darwinian Theory to the Evolution of Companies:

• No winning strategy can last forever.
• Most companies will disappear, just like some species.
• Competition is cutthroat
• The oldest surviving species of wheat still yields new varieties.
• Modified descendants or zooming companies succeed as they become more diversified and can occupy places previously taken by other beings.
• No one can predict which beings become extinct.
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