Arussy - Next is now: 5 steps for embracing change: building a business that thrives into the future

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Dedicated with love to Drora, for turning every change challenge into an experience and never forgetting our cause.

Simon & Schuster

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Copyright 2018 by Lior Arussy

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First Simon & Schuster hardcover edition May 2018

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Interior design by Davina Mock-Maniscalco

Jacket design by Rachel Adam

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-5011-7145-1

ISBN 978-1-5011-7147-5 (ebook)

Dont let what you know limit what you can imagine.

William C. Taylor

I have spent the past thirty yearsfirst as a young editor at Harvard Business Review , then as cofounder of Fast Company magazine, now as an author and lecturerthinking about, writing about, and otherwise wrestling with the hard work of big change. Every so often (and it is, sadly, all too rare), I meet a thinker, or interact with a consultant, or read a book that has a tremendous impact on how I make sense of the forces of disruption that surround us, and illuminates the challenges for leaders who aim to master those forces and renew their organizations. Thats why I stand in awe of Lior Arussy. He is a true triple threat of transformationas a thinker, consultant, and author, his ideas, methodologies, and messages amount to a manifesto on the urgency of change and a manifesto for making it happen.

Before I explore the key themes of Liors important new book and what it means for the future of competition and leadership, Id like to pay a quick visit to the past. Back in the midnineties, right after we published the first issue of Fast Company , we organized a major conference around the question How Do You Overthrow a Successful Company? It wasnt a gathering of young Silicon Valley hotshots eager to take on the business establishment (although that was a target audience for the magazine). It was a gathering of strategists, technologists, and marketers from organizations that had been around for decades, organizations that were icons in their fields, who sensed that there was turbulence and turmoil all around themhuge shifts in markets, technology, and cultureand who were determined to reckon with those shifts and rethink and reimagine every aspect of how they did business and got results. Today, more than two decades later, that question feels more relevant (and vexing) than ever. Thats because the work of making deep-seated, meaningful changebuilding on all your past success, even as you build out a whole new point of view on the futurehas become the defining work of our generation. Thats the question every leader must seek to answer, thats the work every leader signs up to doand thats the challenge Lior Arussy faces head-on in Next Is Now .

How to set the stage for this urgent, provocative, and inexhaustibly useful book? Perhaps the most worthwhile service I can provide is to highlight just a few of the key messages I took away, insights that I believe will be most valuable to everyone who reads it. I will be the first to admit that what strikes me as especially provocative or eye-opening may not strike you in the same way. There is so much unconventional thinking here, so many rich case studies and useful lessons, that every reader may walk away with a slightly different set of personal takeaways.

Heres my first big takeaway: We are living in a world where ordinary is simply not an option . Liors analysis of the forces of change, disruption, and innovation are really a plea for originalityamong companies, brands, and leaders themselves. You cant do big things anymore if you are content with doing things a little better than everyone else or a little differently from how you did them in the past. The goal is no longer to be the best at what lots of other organizations and people already do. Its to be the only one who does what you do. What do you promise that only you can promise? What can you deliver that no one else can deliver? What are you prepared to dofor customers, with partners, with your colleaguesthat other organizations simply cant or wont do? Those are the questions that help you invent the futureand that this book helps you to answer.

But they are also, truth be told, questions that make most of us quite uncomfortable. Which leads to my second big takeaway: The more things change, the more the worries and objections to change remain the same. This book is refreshingly honest about the obstaclesboth organizational and individualthat stand between our intellectual recognition of what changes we need to unleash and our psychological and emotional willingness to do what needs doing. But dont take Liors word for itlisten to a voice from long ago, one more quick visit to the past. If you go back to the very first issue of Fast Company , youll find a thoroughly entertaining article by a fellow named E. F. Borisch. He was the son of the founder of a very successful manufacturing company in the Midwest, an outfit called the Milwaukee Gear Company, and he was the definition of a change agent. He had all sorts of bold ideas about new markets, customer service, reorganizing the workforce. Yet every time he introduced an idea, hed get pushback and objections and worries.

So he sat down and wrote an article called Fifty Reasons Why We Cannot Change, which we happily published. There was no introduction to the article, no conclusion, just a numbered list, from one to fifty, of all the worries and complaints Borisch had heard. What was so funny about the list was that so many of the objections contradicted one another. Reason #1: Weve never done it before. Reason #4: We already tried it before. Reason #7: It wont work in a small company. Reason #8: It wont work in a large company. On and on it went, fifty reasons, each more contradictory than the last.