Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future

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3 Sentence Summary

This book is a guide to business strategy and management for the future. Authors Joi Ito and Jeff Howe break down nine principles that they believe will be key to thriving in more complex and volatile markets. Whiplash challenges you to think differently about how you will leverage new technology and adapt your philosophy to take advantage of an environment where everything is faster, cheaper, and more accessible.

5 Key Takeaways

1. Learning > Education. There’s little use in stockpiling knowledge. It’s more efficient to pull from your network to get information when you need it.
2. Control is an illusion. Instead of worrying so much about the plan, be more focused on developing the culture.
3. Practice > Theory. Learn by doing. Experiment and try new things.
4. Be flexible. Learn new rules and then discard them when they stop working.
5. Resilience > Strength. Learn from your mistakes and adapt. This is how you survive change in uncertain environments.

Whiplash Summary

Introduction

• Technologies are just tools. They are useless, static objects until they are animated by human ideas
• You can no longer assume that costs and benefits will be proportional to size. If anything, the opposite of that assumption is probably true. Today, the biggest threats to the status quo come from the smallest of places, from the startups and rogues; breakaways and indy labs.
• Learning is something you do for yourself. Education is something done to you.

Emergence Over Authority

• Decisions aren’t made so much as they emerge from large groups of employees or stakeholders
• Emergence represents a tectonic shift in the way knowledge is produced and distributed
• Emergent systems presume that every individual within the system possesses unique intelligence that would benefit the group.
• Rather than hiring large teams of engineers, designers, and programmers, startups and individuals can tap into a global community of freelancers and volunteers who can provide the skills they lack
• There has been a proliferation of free and low-cost online and community education. The more opportunities people have to learn new skills, the more innovative they become.
• Emergent systems foster the kind of nonlinear innovation that can react quickly to the kind of rapid changes that characterize the network age

Pull Over Push

• Supply shouldn’t be generated until demand has emerged
• Transform customers into employees
• The culture of emergent innovation will allow everyone to feel a sense of both ownership and responsibility to each other and to the rest of the world, which will empower them to create more lasting change than the authorities who write policy and the law

Compasses Over Maps

• It is nearly impossible to have a detailed plan when leading a complex and creative organization like the media lab. we have to be comfortable with the idea that we are not in control, that we can’t anticipate or even know everything that is going on, but we can still be confident and courageous.
• Instead of rules or even strategy, the key to success is culture.

Risk Over Safety

• Rather than reading business plans and ordering expensive feasibility studies, bet on great people and great ideas
• Weigh the cost of doing something now against the cost of thinking about doing something later. Those who best understand this equation will win as the pace of innovation continues to accelerate.

Disobedience Over Compliance

• Disobedience, especially in crucial realms like problem-solving, often pays greater dividends than compliance.
• If you have the right person on the right project and they are absolutely dedicated to finding the solution, leave them alone. Tolerate their initiative and trust them.
• The people who will be most successful in this environment will be the ones who ask questions, trust their instincts, and refuse to follow the rules when the rules get in their way.

Practice Over Theory

• Some organizations will still spend more time studying a proposal and deciding not to fund it then it would have cost to build it.
• Metrics are important for measuring your progress when you know exactly what you want to do, but they can also stifle innovation
• Education is what other people do to you. Learning is what you do to yourself. There’s a great deal of research showing that people learn best when they can connect the things they’re learning to their interest, their personal relationships, and opportunities they’d like to pursue.
• The people who will be most successful in the coming decades will be those who can tap into their networks to learn the things they need to meet new challenges as they arise. This is where learning over education meets pull over push. Rather than asking students to stockpile knowledge, it empowers them to pull what they need from the network as they need it.

Diversity Over Ability

• The internet has increased the shared brain power brought to bear on any individual problem and, more importantly, facilitates a cognitive diversity that is often lacking in the rarefied climes of the corporate or academic laboratory.
• We should think of our differences as forms of talents. To leverage it requires patience and practice.

Resilience Over Strength

• A resilient organization learns from its mistakes and adapts to its environment. They do not squander resources anticipating distant eventualities, or expand excessive quantities of time or energy and unnecessary formalities and procedures.
• Only when I accept that there will be no winning or losing, just events unfolding in the way I chose to react to them, do I succeed

Systems Over Objects

• Responsible Innovation requires more than speed and efficiency. It also requires a constant focus on the overall impact of new technologies, and an understanding of the connections between people, their communities, and their environments.

Conclusion

• Maintain a healthy relationship with uncertainty. Choose a strategy in which small bets are made on a variety of products or markets or ideas
• Be flexible and able to learn the new rules and discard them when they don’t work anymore.

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