Know Who: Know How for an Open-Source World
About this book
All large and successful companies were built on a great idea. Over time however, companies tend to rest on their laurels, new entrants emerge, margins shrink, and yesterday's great idea becomes commoditized. Growth slows, often it stops. The rise and fall of businesses from launch through growth, maturity, and decline has repeated itself for as long as businesses have existed. Why not try to bend the curve before decline happens? It is possible to reinvent a mature company. But it requires a deliberate plan of attack. BEND THE CURVE offers such a plan by following the experiences of a fictional company, Wellington Worldwide, and the two brothers, Jack and Sam Eastwood, who take their turn leading it. At Wellington Worldwide, tradition trumps innovation and risk is, literally and figuratively, a four-letter word. Sam Eastwood, Wellington's founder and CEO, personifies the culture of a mature company: pursue perfection, celebrate tradition, and protect the status quo at all costs. He is a steward of the past. Wellington's growth curve has flattened and its new product pipeline is, to quote Sam's twin brother Jack, "drier than Extra Brut champagne." Jack is everything Wellington is not. He is a serial entrepreneur and self-made billionaire. He personifies the voice of creative destruction: challenge assumptions, celebrate failure, and create new market space. He is an agent of the future. When Jack loses a bet to Sam, the twins switch lives. Jack moves to Chicago to run Wellington Worldwide while Sam takes the year off.As an entrepreneur who has built several companies from scratch, Jack soon realizes that innovating inside of a mature company is nothing like starting a company from the ground up. Unlike the cultures of the companies Jack had started with great success, Wellington is not an innovator. In fact, everything Wellington does runs contrary to innovation. As Jack and Sam struggle to turn Wellington's growth stall around, they learn they must first transform Wellington's culture from one that is beholden to the past into one positioned to create the future, one that values both operational excellence and innovation simultaneously. Companies that fail to bend the curve typically decline because they attempt to trade one for the other. But the pursuit of operational excellence cannot sustain itself in the absence of the pursuit of continuous innovation, and vice versa. This moral is ultimately delivered through the brothers' experiences as they learn that neither of them alone is right but together they can restore growth and ultimately bend the growth curve at Wellington.Chapter-by-chapter, through the experiences of the Eastwood brothers, BEND THE CURVE offers readers practical, entertaining, and inspiring lessons in how to re-ignite growth through cultural transformation and continuous innovation.