Dream Big and Win

14Pivoting

No matter how hard you try, no matter how diligently you plan and set goals, a time will come when things change and you'll require the agility to switch to a Plan B.

That you must course‐correct isn't what defines you or your company. The ability to pivot is not only one of the Five Ps of Leadership, but also what separates the women from the girls and the men from the boys. Pivoting is how you rebuild and how you rebound, stronger than before.

Words of Wisdom

“A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision.”

—Eric Ries

Netflix and Chill

Some of the biggest companies today still exist because they changed the way they conducted their business, embracing the pivot. For example, look at Netflix. In the beginning, Netflix was a mail‐order DVD service. Users would create a queue of movies and TV shows they wanted to watch. After the consumer viewed their media (or, after, say 50 First Dates sat unwatched on their coffee table for a month), they'd mail it back in a prepaid envelope and as soon as the post office scanned the barcode on the envelope, the next available disc in the queue would then ship. Netflix didn't even wait for the discs to get back to their facility, so viewers weren't impacted by slow mail delivery. Their business model provided an alternative to having to leave the house to hit the crapshoot of what might be available at Blockbuster. The real draw was that there wasn't a time limit on how long you could hold onto a disc, so ...