Product Description

The book that does for companies what WHO MOVED MY CHEESE? does for individual employees, SURVIVAL IS NOT ENOUGH provides a groundbreaking new way to organise companies and thrive during times of change. Everything in our world, from marketing to technology to distribution to the capital markets, is moving at a faster pace than ever. Yet most companies view change as a threat, and survival as the goal. This book transforms all that. It contains a simple yet revolutionary idea: we can evolve our companies the same way nature evolves a species. Evolution is a fundamental force of nature, and Seth Godin demonstrates how it can be put to work in any organisation. The first step is to eliminate the anti-change reflex that's genetically coded into all of us. Once a company learns to 'zoom' (to change without panicking), it is much more likely to evolve. And a company that evolves can become ever more profitable. For the last five years, bestselling author Seth Godin has repeatedly demonstrated the power of his books by living their advice. He used the tactics in PERMISSION MARKETING to drive the book up the bestseller list. He followed the advice of UNLEASHING THE IDEA VIRUS to turn his treatise into a living example of an ideavirus. Now, as a committed zoomer, he shows his legions of fans how to turn their company into one that can zoom from one change to another. It's a formula for success whether the market is up or down, whether technology is hot or not, in all industries, from retail to tech to restaurants.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #456717 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03-03
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
In Survival Is Not Enough, former Yahoo executive and author of Permission Marketing, Unleashing the IdeaVirus and The Big Red Fez Seth Godin turns his attention to the predominant issue facing all business today: change. Godin takes the perspective of an evolutionary biologist, borrowing ideas from the likes of Richard Dawkins, Jared Diamond and Matt Ridley to formulate his own prescription for business survival, a concept he calls "zooming", which he defines as "stretching your limits without threatening your foundation". The result is a wide-ranging and eclectic menu of useful ideas that just about anyone looking to enhance their career, job satisfaction and their company's prospects would do well to consider.--Harry C Edwards

From the Author
Darwin was right.

So was Paul Orfalea.

Darwin described an algorithm. A powerful formula, a formula that never
ceases to work, a formula where no one is in charge.

Penguins don¹t have a meeting about how and when to evolve. They just do it.
It¹s a simple process, really. You have a bunch of offspring, and the ones
that are best suited to the environment live long enough to reproduce.
Successful offspring are simply those that are able to spread their genes
better.

Paul Orfalea, the founder of the Kinko¹s copy chain in the USA, had a
similar brainstorm. He co-founded more than 1,000 copy shops, each in
partnership with a local entrepreneur and manager. He charged his partner
with trying as many new ideas as he could possibly dream up.

Paul¹s job was simple. He went from store to store to see which experiments
were working. The experiments that worked the bestŠ he talked about those
with the other stores. The good genes spread, the bad ones died off. "All of

us are smarter than any one of us," he likes to say.

SURVIVAL IS NOT ENOUGH is a very simple book, but the message is so powerful
I need to take my time laying it out. In a nutshell, I¹m proposing that we
run every business the way Paul Orfalea ran Kinko¹s. I¹m hoping that CEOs
and managers and employees will see the wisdom in Darwin¹s vision and put it
to work today‹before it¹s too late.

Too late? Yes, indeed. You see, most of us work in a factory. Not
necessarily a factory out of Charles Dickens, but a factory nonetheless.
Factories hate change. Factories are designed to do one thing, over and
over, as fast and as cheap as they possibly can.

If you¹re stressed at work (or about work), perhaps the reason is that your
boss wants you to be the buffer between the outside world (change and chaos)
and the inside world (planned stability.) The problem, of course, is that
once the crazy outside world is too much for you, the entire factory is
going to crumble.

Is there an easier way? Is there a way to thrive regardless of the chaos in
the outside world? Could there be a different path, a path where we actually
look forward to the craziness?

I think we can train ourselves (and our companies) to evolve memetically. I
think we can launch a million simultaneous experiments, each designed to
test and measure and repeat and evolve in a continuous loop, beating the
competition at every turn.

I¹m proposing a very radical idea‹let¹s discard the factory. Let¹s give up
100 years of central planning and replace it with a much more fluid, more
data-driven alternative.

Frankly, we all work too hard to settle for just surviving. We can thrive in
this ever-crazy world, and Charles Darwin can show us the way.

About the Author
Seth Godin was founder and CEO of Yoyodyne, the leading interactive marketing company, which Yahoo! acquired in 1998. He was Vice President of Direct Marketing at Yahoo! until he left to lecture full time.

Customer Reviews

A paradigm revisited too often
I am a Seth Godin fan, but this book can not compete with Unleashing the Idea Virus, and certainly not with Permission Marketing. The core message is that change and the ability to change should be at the heart of every organisation that wants to compete and win in a faster and faster changing environment. Godin describes this message from several directions, but it always stays the same message. The parallels he draws with evolution theory and animal live, are interesting, but teh description of the organisation as an organism is not new. A "nice" book to read with some appealing metaphores, but certainly not a must read, even if you like Godin's ideas.

Been Read Before...
I was very pleased with myself when I read this book as a bit of a 'Seth Godin' fan and noted that he used an analogy that I had also used in some company literature about four years ago. And that is kind of my point with this book.

Whereas Seth's other books on Permission Marketing and Idea Viruses are very fresh (at least to me), I felt like I had read the stuff in 'Shift Happen's in 1999 in 'Funky Business' by Jonas Ridderstrale, Kjell Nordstrom, without the self-proclaimed phrases and abbreviations. As a relevant book (bearing in mind it is already 2 years old itself) - I much preferred the other authors style of writing - a little more worldy, lots of examples and figures, and not so American Ra Ra Ra.

If you haven't read Funky Busines (or others like it) then this is the book for you - I am not dismissing it. Seth Godin is quite 'the man' at the moment - just realise that hype isn't everything and the concepts aren't new.