Survival Is Not Enough: Zooming, Evolution, and the Future of Your Company [Hardcover]

In Survival Is Not Enough, former Yahoo executive and author of Permission Marketing Seth Godin turns his attention to the predominant issue facing all business today: change. Godin takes the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, borrowing ideas from the likes of Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond, and Matt Ridley to formulate his own prescription for business survival, a concept he calls "zooming," which he defines as "stretching your limits without threatening your foundation." The result is a wide-ranging and eclectic menu of useful ideas that just about anyone looking to enhance their career, job satisfaction, and their company's prospects would do well to consider. --Harry C. Edwards

In his follow-up to the popular e-book Unleashing the Ideavirus, marketing guru Seth Godin uses Darwin's theory of evolution as an extended metaphor for how companies have to constantly change in order to adapt to unstable economic environments. Survival Is Not Enough: Zooming Evolution, and the Future of Your Company maintains that in these uncertain times, business owners have to constantly tinker with their marketing, products, and personnel, even if they've already discovered some successful strategies. While he lays the metaphors on a little thick, Godin's otherwise clear, crackling prose and real-life examples make the book an engaging read.

Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Tom Peters

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.

It's come to this. All the confusion and chaos and change and turmoil in our working lives have finally tipped the balance. We now need a new way of doing business.

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.