Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(8)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I really enjoyed Seth Godin's Permission Marketing so I had high expectations of Survival is Not Enough and I must say that my expectations were easily met.

I read the book cover to cover in one day and found that Seth's insights were not only meaningful but inspirational.
Any person managing people or thinking of starting a company should invest in reading this book. It will definitely change the way you see the role of people in your company and how companies hold on to survival for dear life rather then embracing change to continue and succeed and as we're shown time and time again "Survival is Not Enough"

Europeans, especially the British, see science as separate from business, and scientists and businessmen as separate species. This book categorically refutes this folly. Science and business are the same. What he is trying to say about the outliers being successful in a changing world is not new. The germans always practiced this principle. Try to do the best job you can and keep improving it technically no end. Provided you are not doing something completely silly, you will find that your only competitor will be, perhaps, another West German company (this is what happened in textiles in Germany). The problem is that we always focus on making that dollar, on the "average" behaviour or achieving some margin. Money is EMERGENT, i.e. just do what you love and at some threshold of excellence the money will follow you. The hidden message of evolution is seeing change as an agent of opportunity rather than a threat. Therefore, governments should encourage and support education, long degrees of 6 years or so, as used to be the norm in France and Germany we require again today even more so than before. Only when the population acquires the hunger for knowledge can they become the flexible individuals able to survive is a dynamic world.

It seems impossible to write a book like this from within the walls of any business, conventional or otherwise. An outsider, however, might easily take the view, Just Do It, unaware of all the obstacles to just doing it. And it isn't useful to suggest Just Do It without providing useful ideas for eliminating, end-running, or leapfrogging the obstacles.

Of course survival is not enough. The world does not need a very diluted version of the book Bioeconomics, for which this book seems like a Cliff Notes. The problem is obvious. Let's hear from those with solutions, people who have devised those solutions and seen them through execution to results. Then we have something. Until then, these are very conventional theories, nicely packaged for easy swallowing.

Godin has authored a number of best-selling business books, notably Permission Marketing, Unleashing the Ideavirus, and most recently Purple Cow. He introduces and then develops a few core concepts in each, illustrating them with dozens of examples drawn from his extensive experience in marketing. Much as I admire his other books, I think this one is his most thoughtful and most thought-provoking, and therefore his most valuable thus far. True, he anchors his material within the framework of Charles Darwin's scientific research on natural selection. To his credit, Godin does not claim to be a scientist although his curiosity about scientific phenomena is immediately obvious. He allows Darwin to collaborate with him on the formulation of this book's Foreword. Then in the Introduction, Godin observes that he has been fascinated with Darwin's work for a long time and eventually realized that "companies are very much like species." However, unlike animals, many business executives "fret" about all the chaos which surrounds them. They sign with relief when surviving the latest major crisis. Here is one of Godin's key points: "I believe that there's a goal beyond survival, that we can actually thrive and find joy in working with all the chaos that surrounds us. That we can look forward to change and turbulence as an opportunity to increase our success." Godin believes that there is a new paradigm developing, "a pretty radical way of thinking about business, but one that's nothing new to an evolutionary biologist." Godin wrote this book to explain the paradigm, and, to convince his reader on why her or his enterprise should seize (not merely pursue) all of the new opportunities which that paradigm creates. "Transformative success" awaits those which do.

As I read this book, I was reminded of what Shira White asserts in New Ideas About New Ideas: To generate new ideas, it is first necessary to generate new ideas about how to do that. Otherwise, the results will probably be the same. I have yet to encounter anyone who denies the importance of "creative" or "innovative" thinking. We all realize that Edisons are few and far between. However, as White, Godin, and countless others have correctly pointed out, all of us can develop new perspectives and then the requisite skills by which to free ourselves from mindsets which preclude (and often denigrate) creative, innovative thinking. In Leading Change, Jim O'Toole characterizes these mindsets as "the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom." Godin wrote this book to challenge but also to encourage his reader to consider very carefully the reasons why survival is not enough...and never will be. He summarizes his key points in the Introduction (pages 6-8) and then examines each in the ten chapters which follow.

One of the book's most valuable sections consists of what Godin characterizes as "The Important Questions." Each of the 37 is followed by a brief response and, when appropriate, a related question or two. Sometimes a list, such as of "the five elements of an evolving organization" (page 230) and "ten tactics for companies that want to evolve quickly" (page 231). "These are questions that can start you, your group and your company on the way to building a zooming organization, one that adapt and respond rather than [merely] react to change." As he does in his other books, Godin once again demonstrates his skills as a pyrotechnical thinker who develops his own nomenclature. Probably because he examines so many correlations between Darwin's scientific research in the mid-19th century and his own experiences in the contemporary business world, Godin includes a Glossary of terms which I think should be read first.

Sun Tzu, Machiavelli, Darwin, and the military battlefield are among the conceits which many writers of business books have used to frame their own ideas. More often than not, the correlations seem contrived but that is not true in this instance. Earlier I presumed to suggest that this is Godin's most important book thus far and now hope that I have offered, in this brief commentary, some reasons why I think so. Those who share my high regard for this book are urged to check out Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, William Bridges' Managing Transitions, John McMillan's Reinventing the Bazaar, and Andrew Hargadon's How Breakthroughs Happen.

I got axed like 6 months ago cuz my boss had read The Ideavirus by Godin and concluded our marketing dept was expendable. Now, turns out I got re-hired cuz of  Zooming.
She realized that I was one of those wizards Godin talks about in the book (conveniently not covered in Ideavirus).
Hey Godin! I hope you've got some kinda caveat or something
for impressionable CEOs in Purple Cow....

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.

As a person on the hunt for the ultimate job I found this book refreshing, hoping that the future CEOs will be reading this book and can understand the importance of keeping people motivated and giving them the freedom to try new things.

This book helped open my mind up a bit on how to deal with others who do not have the desire to soom, or those that are skeptical of such ideas.

This book is by no means a traditional business book, and that may turn a lot of business people off, many of the ideas are kind of new-age, but the beauty of it is that not every idea is a good one, but atleast it makes you think in new ways.

There arent many books that I agree wth more than 90 pct of, but this is one of them. Seth does a great job of presenting exactly what every executive must understand in order to compete in business today.

Every CEO or businessperson has to put their own business in context of the world around them . Seth makes it clear that no business, no matter how successful or incumbent in their industry is in a vacuum and when its your business you better realize that if you dont zoom above the best, you fall with the rest :)...

I go back to this book often as a reminder to keep on pushing myself to be a "zoomer" and let those around me be the same. I not only recommend it to friends, I have already sent a few copies to my buddies at the NBA..

Congrats on a great book Seth

m

Seth Godin has a ton of great ideas and about four of them are in this book. I have enjoyed other books and tapes by Mr. Godin and was hoping this would be another enjoyable read, it wasn't. He seemed to be talking about things he didn't really know much about so he filled it with a bunch of words that never said anything. Anytime he touched on internet business, you could sense his excitement and expertise. My advice, read something else by him first- such as his ideavirus book, now that is a good book.

I like books that don't require learning an imaginary language. Reading Sartre once was enough. I like books that don't require quantum leaps of logic. I like books that don't require a complete suspension of my system of disbelief. I like books that I that I can finish. I didn't like this book.

Looking for philosophical business thought from science? See "Leadership and the New Science: Discovering Order in a Chaotic World Revised" by Margaret J. Wheatley