Find Your Next
- By Andrea Kates
- Mcgraw Hill, $30.00,
- 198 pages
Previous to the past decade, the way businesses got by was in setting targets to achieve incremental growth and plug along, generally with status quo, which at that time satisfied shareholders enough.
But in just a short 10 years, we have seen more disruptive forces that have turned that prehistoric business practice on its heels. Take for example the time when Napster came along and changed the world overnight by “illustrating to record companies their vulnerability in the new age of online digital music distribution.”
According to Andrea Kates, author of Find Your Next, this was a crossroads point in the music business.
“As a result of that revolutionary crisis, the term “Napster Moment” has been added to our business vocabularies” says Kates. She points out the same is now taking place in the publishing industry.
In her book, Kates describes the concept of the Business Genome approach, which is essentially a view point that businesses are a combination of ‘genes’ and the arrangement of these genes are what make it successful…or not.
Kates’ book delivers the insights needed to apply this approach to any business and explains the four steps needed to help businesses ‘find their next’ incarnation.
The steps include sorting the company’s options, matching the company genome against other successful businesses and then hybridizing the company with those ideas.
Find Your Next is designed for business leaders who want to turn their hunches about what might be into what can be and what is… and probably best to do this before your company runs into a crossroads style Napster Moment.
– Craig Lund, is the President of Marketing services firm Marketing Talent Inc. and can be reached at clund@marketingtalentinc.com or on twitter @craiglund
