WAY 3Never Be Surprised: Being strategically paranoid enables an organization to move ahead of potential competition.
About the Way
When your teams are heads down building a moonshot, you as leaders should not be. World‐changing breakthroughs often become yesterday's news when the next shiny, new idea promises to change the world. The organizations and leaders whose survival depends on these breakthroughs can quickly find themselves on page two in the newspaper, hidden below the scroll, or simply ignored by their once‐awed customers, investors, and others. It is incumbent on those aiming for moonshots to maintain a healthy dose of paranoia about their technologies, businesses, and customers so that the “new, new thing” does not upend them.
You can find instances of strategic paranoia across government and industry. In the US, ARPA—or Advanced Research Projects Agency, later renamed as DARPA—was formed in 1958 as a response to the USSR's unexpected launch of the Sputnik satellite. The fear and paranoia sparked by Sputnik led the US government to choose that “in the future we would be the initiator and not the victim of strategic technological surprises.”1 Since that point, and well beyond American defense, DARPA's influence has been felt worldwide, as the agency has “ended up shaping the modern world, helping to create missile defence and stealth technology, as well as the internet, the personal computer, the laser and GPS.”2 Today, DARPA evens calls its fundamental research ...
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