Leading Through Uncertainty: How Umpqua Bank Emerged from the Great Recession Better and Stronger than Ever

14

Practice Incremental Evolution

Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.

—Carl Sagan

Some would say that businesses are like plants: if they're not growing, they're dying. While businesses and plants in reality have little or nothing in common with one another, it's true that companies have to grow and change to remain vital and strong. In his book Leading the Revolution, Gary Hamel writes about the importance of establishing and nurturing a competitive gap.¹ Competitive gaps are innovations that companies create to separate themselves from their competitors.

The moment you create a competitive gap, you've constantly got to find ways to maintain it. This requires either creating new quantum leaps that dramatically widen the gap ...