Jack Covert Selects - The Reinventors

The Reinventors: How Extraordinary Companies Pursue Radical Continuous Change by Jason Jennings, Portfolio, 256page, $26.95, May 2012, ISBN 9781591844235

The once vital Main Streets of America are all but out of business, boarded up or filled with antique stores shopping the delights and detritus of another era. Jason Jennings visits the main street of his own abandoned hometown at the beginning of The Reinventors to use it as a metaphor for "what will happen to you, your job, and your business unless you become a reinventor completely committed to constant radical change and growth."

Jennings' previous books, Less Is More, Think Big, Act Small, It's Not the Big That Eat the Small ... It's the Fast that Eat the Slow, and Hit the Ground Running all made a case for business agility in one way or another. This new book does so as well, and then takes it one step further by stressing the need for business model agility. According to a 2010 IBM Global Study:

It turns out that 67 percent of worldwide leaders think their current business model is only sustainable for another three years, while another 31 percent believe their current model might have as long as five years.

So The Reinventors should find a home on many executives' desks, as the time is now to begin the process of serially reinventing your business, to highlight companies that are good at it, and to teach other leaders how to master the skill. The history of business has always been one of churn, of quick rises and dramatic falls, and smart leaders know that they are but temporary stewards in that history and must transition their companies through that change.

Your job as you know it and your business as it is currently run will eventually change. The only chance any of us have for prosperity is to constantly reimagine, rethink, and reinvent everything we do and how we do it in order to remain relevant. We must all become reinventors, and we'd better do it quickly.

If you made it though the recession with your job or business intact, everything may seem more stable now that you are on the other side of it. But remember that the world under your business is still silently shifting, and you are going to have to shift with it. Jennings is not going to give you a new business model to do that with in this book, but he will teach you how to figure it out for yourself, how to be more aggressively innovative, how to become a serial reinventor.