Isn’t that the enduring challenge even the most successful businesses and brands face? What keeps us up at night and why we go into the office every morning?
Shift Ahead: How the Best Companies Stay Relevant in a Fast-Changing World offers sound advice on both understanding where you really are today and how the rapidly approaching future consistently makes hash of what everyone from the C-suite to Wall Street took to be the best laid plans…
Written by my friend and former colleague, Allen Adamson and Joel Steckel, Shift Ahead helps you see around the corner, course correct with conviction, and go to market with purpose – all within the constantly changing landscape of today. The authors speak with appropriate authority, given Allen’s the former North American Chairman, of Landor Associates and Joel’s been a professor with New York University’s Stern School of Business for more than twenty years.
Together they show how to see storms in apparently calm waters; how to refocus and respond decisively, bringing your organization along with you, and how to live the hard strategic truth that marketplace success is a journey full of trials - not a simple destination. It’s an educational perspective amplified by an insight laden list of telling real-world examples, including HBO, Adobe, National Geographic, my personal favorite BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Kodak.
At the end of the day, of course, it all comes down to leadership, or who does what when lo and behold there are icebergs dead ahead. And in business, now more than ever, this amounts to the desire and ability to know who you are while steadily evolving through time with authentic clarity - both culturally and operationally - because for everyone, as the authors of Shift Ahead make quite clear, “the future is closer than you think”.