Think Again by Adam Grant EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Adam Grant
- Publish Date: February 2, 2021
- Language: English
- Genre: Motivational Business Management
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 20.1 MB
- Pages: 240
- Price: Free
- ISBN: 978-1984878106
A Preacher, a Prosecutor, a
Politician, and a Scientist Walk
into Your Mind
Progress is impossible without change; and those who cannot change their minds
cannot change anything.
—GEORGE BERNARD SHAW
You probably don’t recognize his name, but Mike Lazaridis has
had a defining impact on your life. From an early age, it was
clear that Mike was something of an electronics wizard. By the
time he turned four, he was building his own record player out of
Legos and rubber bands. In high school, when his teachers had broken
TVs, they called Mike to fix them. In his spare time, he built a
computer and designed a better buzzer for high school quiz-bowl
teams, which ended up paying for his first year of college. Just months
before finishing his electrical engineering degree, Mike did what so
many great entrepreneurs of his era would do: he dropped out of
college. It was time for this son of immigrants to make his mark on the
world.
Mike’s first success came when he patented a device for reading
the bar codes on movie film, which was so useful in Hollywood that it
won an Emmy and an Oscar for technical achievement. That was small
potatoes compared to his next big invention, which made his firm the
fastest-growing company on the planet. Mike’s flagship device quickly
attracted a cult following, with loyal customers ranging from Bill Gates
to Christina Aguilera. “It’s literally changed my life,” Oprah Winfrey
gushed. “I cannot live without this.” When he arrived at the White
House, President Obama refused to relinquish his to the Secret
Service.
Mike Lazaridis dreamed up the idea for the BlackBerry as a
wireless communication device for sending and receiving emails. As of
the summer of 2009, it accounted for nearly half of the U.S.
smartphone market. By 2014, its market share had plummeted to less
than 1 percent.
When a company takes a nosedive like that, we can never pinpoint
a single cause of its downfall, so we tend to anthropomorphize it:
BlackBerry failed to adapt. Yet adapting to a changing environment
isn’t something a company does—it’s something people do in the
multitude of decisions they make every day. As the cofounder,
president, and co-CEO, Mike was in charge of all the technical and
product decisions on the BlackBerry. Although his thinking may have
been the spark that ignited the smartphone revolution, his struggles
with rethinking ended up sucking the oxygen out of his company and
virtually extinguishing his invention. Where did he go wrong?
Most of us take pride in our knowledge and expertise, and in
staying true to our beliefs and opinions. That makes sense in a stable
world, where we get rewarded for having conviction in our ideas. The
problem is that we live in a rapidly changing world, where we need to
spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking.
Rethinking is a skill set, but it’s also a mindset. We already have
many of the mental tools we need. We just have to remember to get
them out of the shed and remove the rust.
SECOND THOUGHTS
With advances in access to information and technology, knowledge
isn’t just increasing. It’s increasing at an increasing rate. In 2011, you
consumed about five times as much information per day as you would
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