Introduction
Sometimes tweaks aren't enough. Sometimes nothing short of reinventing yourself, your organization, or your community is called for. The beginning of the twenty-first century is one of those times. If anything is certain about the new millennium, it's the pace of change. New technology relentlessly hurdles into our lives. Ideas and practices travel around the world at Internet speed. Social media enables individuals to self-organize and reorganize in ways unimaginable in the twentieth century. We also live in anxious times marked by economic uncertainty, but one thing is clear: relevancy is more fleeting than ever. How to stay relevant in a changing and uncertain world is one of the most important questions of our time.
Thriving in the midst of today's frenetic pace of change requires a new set of approaches and tools. Incremental change may have been enough at the end of an industrial era marked by “me-too” products and services, process reengineering, best practices, benchmarks, and continuous improvement. We have built institutions that are far better at share taking than at market making. We have become really good at tweaks. There are tons of books, experts, and tools to help us make marginal improvements in the way things work today and to fight it out with existing competitors for one more share point. But how do we become market makers? Incremental change may be necessary but it isn't sufficient for the twenty-first century, which will be defined by next practices, ...
