Everyone Is A Business: Orchestrating Innovation In Your Life, Career And Business

The world is witnessing a major shift in the way individuals seek, manage and earn their living – brought on by two colliding phenomena. First the Great Recession has left corporations shrinking and with increasing investment in digital automation has led directly to a “hollowing out” of the traditional workforce. Second, those same technology advances are unleashing a wave of innovations and new entrepreneurs with the skills and platforms that allow them to compete in, and disrupt, markets previously the sole domain of larger corporations.
Innovation is both threatening and enhancing our lives, careers and the way we do business. Whether you are an employee, manager, entrepreneur, freelancer or professional, understanding these shifts in innovation will be critical to the success of your career, practice or business. The days of taking a ‘safe’ job are disappearing in a climate of economic renewal and turbulence.
Hence you must think strategically like a business, have the discipline of a business, take risks like a business, innovate like a business, utilize technology like a business and sell and promote yourself like a business. You are the product and the brand.
All of a sudden Everyone is a Business.

In my career I have progressed through music and film, on to creative and technical roles with Apple, startup companies and most recently as a managing consultant with IBM in the areas of organizational innovation and change. I apply all those experiences in my own consulting practice working from small local enterprises to global corporations. Yet having seen more good ideas fail than succeed I have pursued doctoral studies to understand why that is so. And I feel I have come up with some answers. Building a strong synergy between your business, purpose, technology and people is the key yet it requires a new way of perceiving innovation and developing your business.

Utilizing a fresh new approach to the way you can structure your career and businesses my original research into Synergistic Design will help you develop a strategy to succeed in a collaborative economy. This introduction to Synergistic Design shows how to build innovative teams, projects and companies while providing a new structure for startups that is more likely to succeed when used in conjunction with a lean business approach.

And there has never been a better time to start your own high performance business and take control of your career.

The book clearly demonstrates both the current threats and opportunities that this wave of digital disruption can bring such as:
- We are in the third great wave of invention and economic disruption
- The Great Recession has left corporations investment shy and overhead wary
- Hence digital automation is “hollowing out” the traditional workforce forcing individuals to find new streams of income
- Innovation is surging on a number of fronts simultaneously leading to a convergence of new ideas, products and services.
- Meanwhile the combination of increased education, ubiquitous technology and the casualization of work leads to a labor pool of over-qualified, internet-savvy and under-employed graduates.
- Individuals are collaborating and building online network platforms that bypass conventional business models and undercut bricks and mortar corporations.
- Grassroots entrepreneurism, accessible capital and lean business models are fuelling a surge in new ventures in industry sectors most vulnerable to disruptive innovation including music and entertainment, finance, travel and accommodation.
- To be competitive and manage your career or business you must now be fully conversant in the relevant business models, enabling technologies and customer expectations that are driving your industry.
- The very people impacted by this shift from corporation to collaboration models of doing business will also be the ones to drive and accelerate the shift.