The Road to Reinvention summary

After you’ve completed a tough task, such as finishing a major project or closing an important deal, you probably feel like you’ve earned a bit of a break.

However, in the business world, there is nothing more dangerous!

Continued success means being on constant alert, never taking a break and always being ready to reinvent yourself as conditions change.

The key to reinvention is in staying innovative. In the 1960s, Nike became a household name after inventing the modern athletic shoe. But afterward Nike didn’t just rest on its laurels. The company kept pushing, testing boundaries and investing new products.

Two recent examples include the company’s Fuel Band, an LED-display wristband that measures physical activity and helps the wearer reach fitness goals; and the Fly Knit Racer, a shoe made of knitted threads rather than traditional materials.

This kind of outside-the-box thinking led the magazine Fast Company to rank Nike in 2013 as the most innovative company in the world. Nike’s success confirms this; between 2006 and 2012, company revenue rose 60 percent.

Importantly, if you don’t disrupt the market with your own business reinvention, then another company surely will.

At its peak, the Borders bookselling chain had over 1,200 stores and by 2009, annual sales had topped $3 billion. Yet just two years later, the company had collapsed. What happened?

Borders Books failed to see that the market was changing. It didn’t embrace the digitization of media through e-books, downloading and streaming, and focused only on physical books, CDs and DVDs, investing heavily in physical stores that the digital market was making obsolete.

Clearly, reinvention is necessary to keep your business relevant. The next blinks will offer a starting point on how to begin the process of reinvention.