This book is for dissatisfied technology leaders. The leaders in product, technology, design, marketing, and digital at established organizations. Forward thinking leaders who know there’s a better way of doing things, but still find themselves struggling to generate the momentum needed to drive their legacy organizations into the future. We did not write this for startups, although the patterns we outline can still be applied to start-ups.
In many ways, start-ups have it a little easier because “the first release is always free.” The first release is free because you don’t have an existing system and customers that you’re going to interrupt. Enterprise organizations do. When you have an existing business that you’re running, it’s infinitely harder to change. You must figure out how to not disrupt your business while you’re being asked to transform.
That’s hard to do, but it’s not impossible. Successful, established organizations are structured to resist change to protect the franchise, but change is the very thing that we need to be innovative and transformative. Change is difficult because as the company grew through success in the market, the organization itself developed “muscle memory”, and digital technology has challenged that like no other. The company itself may be facing existential threats putting its future
in jeopardy. Unlearning and breaking existing muscle memory is difficult, but rather than thinking of it as unlearning, it’s more like cutting a new groove, where the more you make the new motion, the easier it becomes. The more you do that motion of new learning, the easier that becomes. Organizations don’t need to just transform; they need to make transformation itself something that they master.
