Haydn Shaughnessy - Shift: A Users Guide to the New Economy

Praise for

Shift

Its impossible to do justice to a book of such breadth and depth in two or three lines. Shift tells us everything we wanted to know about the emerging digital economy but were afraid to ask. It gives a uniquely comprehensive and deep explanation of emerging leadership and management practices. Among many other important contributions to our understanding of economic change, it shows how the practice of strategic options building can help position companies in a time of uncertainty and provides insights into the new tools of managing complexity.

Stephen Denning, author, The Leaders Guide to Radical Management

Shift shines a light through all of the hype around driving and surviving disruptive change in business today. It is an engaging and thought-provoking read.

Amar Hanspal, senior vice president, IPG Product Group, Autodesk

Shift is mandatory reading for anybody who wants to move beyond the tactics of enterprise innovation. Haydn has done a tremendous job in contextualizing innovation by elastic and fluid enterprises that have the capabilities to move at rocket speed in todays fast moving disruption environment. The chapters on innovation capabilities, platform thinking and externalisation represent some of the most refreshing reflections and insights of the last decade. With Shift , Haydn has positioned himself in the same league as Clayton Christensen.

Peter Vander Auwera, co-founder, Innotribe

To transform anything, start by changing your lens. Shift by Haydn Shaughnessy is a must-read lens-changer for innovation junkies everywhere.

Saul Kaplan, founder and chief catalyst, Business Innovation Factory

Haydn Shaughnessy nails a key issue in modern business process evolution: THERE IS EVOLUTION, and its fast and game changing. The new wave and spirit of private entrepreneurship, often around enabling platforms, is changing the way business is being conducted everywhere. This book offers eye-opening insights into what is going on and what may be the implications of the new paradigmatic shifts taking place in business today.

Mikael Collan, professor of strategic finance, Lappeenranta University of Technology; author, The Pay-Off Method

Shift is an excellent read with the academic rigour expected of Haydn Shaughnessy. The surprise wasI found this text uplifting. Outdated institutions that fail to meet the needs of the worlds peoples are unsustainable. The future holds a seismic shift and might, just might, be a much better place.

Lynne Bowers, former NHS Director; National Third Sector Ambassador

Haydn Shaughnessys new book, Shift , is a much-needed examination of how economic models are evolving in an increasingly connected world. By going beyond the current tech industry hype to detail how these new business and financial models impact work style, government participation and the decentralization of value creation, Shift delivers the level of depth that helps the readers understand the changing, global economic landscapeand what it means to them. Shift provides clear examples that serve as indicators of how the future will likely unfold, while detailing prescriptive guidance on what tomorrows successful companies need to do today to embrace thelong-term shifts ahead.

Matt Flanagan, founding partner, Fama PR, Inc.

This book will prove particularly useful if youre a senior IT or telecommunications professional, app developer or content producer. It shows step-by-step how to view investment priorities and return metrics through the lens of change management, as well as how to create new options for your own career trajectory or business model. Highly recommended to gain a deeper understanding of the current landscape and its balance of competing influences.

Erica Levy Klein, senior partner, LinkedInBusinessCoach.com

Shift is a powerful work full of insight stemming from Haydn Shaughnessys formidable powers of observation and research. He paints a very vivid, very detailed picture about a global society, led by its young people who are fed-up and no longer asking their betters, government, or elders for reliefor permission. Theyre taking matters into their own hands and disrupting convention in ways that work better for themfrom Uber to Spotify to VICE to Tinder to Airbnb. Studied, cutting and instructive, this is a must-read for anyone interested in how and why things changesometimes even in the blink of an eye.

Patrick Reynolds, chief strategy officer, Triton Digital

Innovation is getting a bad name these days due to buzzword fatigue and, frankly, bad best practices. Haydn Shaughnessy has been working with companies in banking, telecommunications and tech to properly frame global forces of change, and map out strategies to react to or drive them. Shift should be on every senior executives e-book reader of choice.

David Card, VP Research, Gigaom Research

Haydn has done it againhe has seen the future and he is bringing it to us. And the future is already here; it is just not yet evenly distributed. Shift is about the rise of the commonsabout individuals coming together in unprecedented scale to change the world in massively distributed open teams and, in the process, rewriting the rules of economics, innovation, entrepreneurship and the nature of work. Haydn sees powerful shifts where other people see siloed phenomena. He has captured the spirit of how value gets created in the age of mobile, social and digital technologies. The only challenge I now face is not being able to put Shift down.

Lora Kratchounova, vice chair, MIT Enterprise Forum; principal, ScratchMM

Reading Shift will not only teach you how to identify trends, but more importantly how to adapt, respond and profit from disruption.

Gene Marks, president, The Marks Group PC; columnist for The New York Times , Forbes.com and Entrepreneur.com

Contents

Preface

Shift stems from work that I did with Nick Vitalari in preparation for The Elastic Enterprise , our jointly authored book published in 2012. We began compiling the results of our research on the topic of next-generation enterprises in 2010. At the time, we were busy working at an economic think tank looking at companies that became stellar performers during the worst recession on record.

Through our research, it became obvious that even at the peak of the Great Recession, some companies were not remotely constrained by the economic crisis that engulfed the rest of the world. They grew. More than that, they embarked on journeys that would quickly establish them as the best-performing companies in history.

Partly by accident and partly by design, they changed the way their businesses functioned and influenced hundreds of businesses across the globe. They changed the basic operating model of the firm and the structure of the industries in which they operated. As a result, policy makers, executives, employees, and small businesses today are asking, have we created a different kind of engine for growth? And if so, what do we do next?