Did we just have the year we had to have?
Let’s leave your feelings about Donald Trump aside for a moment. What has actually happened?
Firstly, most people — experts in particular — got it wrong. The odds were that someone else would win. With Brexit, it was the same.
What’s happened since? The stock market was supposed to collapse. It went down briefly and has posted new highs ever since. Some say that might continue. Based on the track record of the average forecaster, they will probably be wrong too.
The only certainty is that we are entering a period of exceptional uncertainty. When it comes to public policy, business regulation, global trade, diplomacy or politics in general, we have no idea what’s coming. The world’s operating system is changing and we are in the middle of a reboot.
It’s no different at work
When Steve Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he slashed 90% of existing product development. On a whiteboard he drew a simple alternative plan. It was a two-by-two matrix. The columns were Consumer and Pro; the rows were Desktop and Portable. Four market segments; four products. Everything else was eliminated. Apple was rebooted.
Often, a few ideas can be better than a lot.
That story appeared in the last chapter of our last book, 60 Second Recharge. Since then, many simple business models have built up massive traction in the marketplace by simply doing things differently.
Success hasn’t only come from proprietary technology. Most enterprises use systems and software developed by firms other than their own. Driving their success is adherence to basic behavioural concepts coupled with commercial logic. They are less like inventors and more like drivers. They take existing systems— like the cloud or apps — apply them to their vision and drive them to market in a new and convenient form.
Agility is the key to surviving uncertainty
With that in mind, we decided to publish an updated and edited collection of some of our most tractable ideas. It’s called Management Reboot. No chapter will take more than five minutes to read. There are 52 of them. That’s one a week. Each asks you to review your business and your life from multiple perspectives and come up with ideas you might otherwise have missed.
Is that a big statement? Maybe, but there’s plenty of cartoons to lighten the load. We’ve put some of the ideas onto iTunes so you can listen on the way to work. Others are videos you can watch on YouTube. Some have downloads from my website. For convenience, QR codes will connect your mobile device to any of them.
But here’s the point. Take five minutes once a week to step outside your business model, your career or your startup idea and check that you’ve got all the bases covered. Parts of your life may need a reboot.
It's not just about surviving uncertain times. Growth, in both business and life, is about momentum. Constant review will help you maintain it.
