دانلود کتاب تسلط بر عدم قطعیت – چگونه بنیانگذاران بزرگ، کارآفرینان و رهبران کسب و کار در یک دنیای غیرقابل پیش بینی رشد می کنند

Childhood memories are funny things. I can remember starring as a hedge in the school play when I was little – standing at the back, occasionally rustling my tissue-paper leaves for dramatic effect – but don’t remember tumbling down the stairs and breaking my arm, which happened around the same time. I have a grainy photo of another childhood scene on my desk: my brother and I dressed as astronauts, grinning like idiots with our rain boots wrapped in tinfoil. I don’t remember this either, but I wish I did. It looks as though we’re having the time of our lives. Memories from my teenage years are also patchy, but I remember a conversation with my father as if it happened yesterday. An engineer by training, Dad was technical director of a company that made loudspeakers for recording studios. As he demonstrated a prototype, I asked how he’d arrived at the design and his response left an indelible impression: ‘You start with how the ears work.’ Mastering first principles was crucial when it came to design and engineering, he explained, and applying them rather than copying what already existed was the gateway to innovation. It was reassuring to know that there was an underlying logic to the world, but also exciting. With these invisible laws at our command, I had the sense that anything was possible, a worldview I carried into adulthood. I began my career designing websites and software. Then, as the number of channels proliferated – apps, kiosks and social media platforms alongside showrooms and contact centres – I found myself helping clients connect them to create complete customer experiences. I studied my field thoroughly, but felt that something was missing from the literature – a set of first principles that were easy to grasp and apply to increase our odds of success. I set out to fill this important gap myself, and it led to my first book, The Ten Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences. It won the CMI’s Management Book of the Year, some companies ordered a thousand copies at a time, and I’ve heard from readers worldwide who have used these simple principles successfully. I was, however, unprepared for the impact on my career. Rather than being asked to do the job I’d spent a decade attempting to master – designing product or service experiences – clients now saw me as a consultant who could advise them on more strategic matters. As I embarked on this new phase, I became fascinated by how often people leapt straight to solutions without first diagnosing the problem. One company, for example, had a new product that was underperforming, despite them spending heavily on advertising. They assumed the problem was the design of the website landing pages, but had not stopped to ask themselves more fundamental questions. Did people actually want the product? Was it correctly priced? Was the advertising executed well enough to be effective? Did people associate this kind of product with their brand? How did it compare with the competition? Were there adoption barriers that prevented customers from considering it? When I put forward this range of possibilities in an initial meeting, the responses resembled a bizarre shrugging competition. The more prospects that contacted me, the more I realised that many people had little idea of the root causes behind their problems, or where they should focus their attention to achieve their growth ambitions. They also didn’t consider the implications of their decisions beyond their immediate surroundings – their skillset or department was a horizon they couldn’t see beyond. Very few, it seemed, considered their business as an interconnected whole.