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Contents

Foreword, by Charles Darwin

Introduction: More Than SurvivalThe Paul Orfalea Story: A Process, Not a Plan
Survival Is Not Enough: The Summary

Chapter 1 ChangeGuillotine or Rack?
Frantic at Work?
Businesses That Don't Change Are in Danger
Change Is the New Normal
What Happens When the Jaguars Die?
The Problem with Factories
What's the Internet Got to Do with the Chaos?
Successful Businesses Hate Change
The Promise of Positive Feedback Loops and Runaway
Runaway Can't Last Forever -- Nothing Does
The Best Form of Runaway Is the Least Obvious
The Evolution Alternative

Chapter 2 What Every CEO Needs to Know About Evolution
Competition Drives Change
The Big Ideas
What's a Meme?
Memes Are Not the Same As Genes
Periodicity in Memes
Genes versus Memes
Denying Evolution Doesn't Make It Go Away

Chapter 3 Fear and ZoomingFour Reasons People Freeze in the Face of Change
The First Barrier to Change: Committees
The Second Barrier to Change: Critics
Market Leaders Are Afraid of Failing
Change Equals Death
Why Change Management Doesn't Work
The Way to Build an Organization That Can Embrace Change Is to Redefine Change

Chapter 4 Do You Zoom?Start Zooming Before the Crisis Comes
What About the Creative Corporation?
Zoom First and Ask Questions Later
Comparing Zooming to Re-engineering
Avoid the Dragon, Don't Slay It
Which Sort of Pain Are You Going to Feel?

Chapter 5 Your Company Has mDNAThe Vocabulary of Genes and Memes in Nature and at Work
The Power of the Metaphor
Why Evolution Works
Companies Evolve
Evolution from the Ground Up
The Red Queen Goes to Work
One Good Reason That CEOs Reject Evolution as an Alternative -- and Why They're Wrong
CEOs Enjoy Picking Lottery Numbers
Evolution at Wal-Mart
Natural Selection and Artificial Selection
Runaway Times Ten
Is Incremental Change Enough?

Chapter 6 Winning Strategies, Getting Unstuck and SexTyping in France
The Winning Strategy
The Stuck Winning Strategy
Competent People Embrace the Current Winning Strategy
Piling On to the New Winning Strategy
Extinction as a Way of Life
Sexual Selection at Work
Six Ways Companies Can Use Signaling Strategies
Your Most Important Sex Is with Your Boss
Embracing New mDNA
Sex Is Important
Artificially Selecting the mDNA in Your Company (aka Firing People)
Choose Your Customers, Choose Your Future

Chapter 7 Serfs, Farmers, Hunters and WizardsThe Danger of Role Models
Amazon Tweaks and Tests While Wal-Mart Struggles
Wizards, Hunters, Farmers and Serfs
The Life of a Serf
Why Do Companies Hire Serfs?
The End of the Serf Era
Transforming Serfs into Farmers
Let Some of the Serfs Work Somewhere Else
Farmers Know How to Tweak
Amazon Knows How to Farm
QVC Outfarms Amazon
Think Like a Waiter
Hunters Don't Own Land
AOL Knows How to Hunt
Fast Feedback Loops for Hunters
Plenty of Companies Have No Clue How to Hunt
Choose Your Employees, Choose Your Future
Wizards Invent
In Defense of Slack

Chapter 8 The Basic Building Block Is PeopleIt Starts and Ends with the Individual
Changing Your Personal mDNA: Bad News from My Sister
Find a Great Boss
If You Want the Soup, Order the Soup
Starting Down the Road to the Zooming Organization
The Best Way to Stop Your Company from Zooming
The Zooming Club
A Quick Lesson in Avoiding the Acquisition Trap

Chapter 9 Why It Works Now: Fast Feedback and Cheap ProjectsFast Feedback Loops
The Power of the Obligating Question
Linux Is Cool -- But It's Not What You Think
Technology and Fast Feedback Loops
I'll Know It When I See It -- The Power of Prototypes
A Prototyping Pitfall
Data Is Not Information -- Keeping the Promise of IT
Putting a Man on the Moon
A Broken Feedback Loop
Implementing Hotwash
Plan for Success...and Plan for Failure

Chapter 10 Tactics for Accelerating EvolutionCherish the Charrette
Animals Evolve on a Regular Schedule
Bring Back Model Years
Alternate the Teams that Work on New Models
Better Beats Perfect
Slow Down Is Not the Opposite of Hurry Up
What to Do If Your People Get Stuck
One Thing Worth Stealing from the Supermarket
The Eternal Web Page
Everybody Brainstorms
The Suggestion Box Is Not Dead
Take the Dumpster Test
Living with Broken Windows
Let's Test It!
Should There Be a Statute of Limitations on mDNA?
Does Chaos Outside Mean Chaos Inside?
Focus Is No Longer Sufficient
Bringing It All Together: Decision Time at Environmental Defense
The Über Strategy?

The Important QuestionsWhy?
How do you respond to small, irrelevant changes?
How many people have to say "yes" to a significant change?
Do you have multiple projects in development that bet on conflicting sides of a possible outcome?
Are you building the five elements of an evolving organization?
Are you investing in techniques that encourage fast memetic evolution?
What does someone need to do to get fired?
Who are the three most powerful people standing between things that need to change and actual action by your company?
What if you fired those people?
What's your company's winning strategy?
Is each manager required to have her staff spend a portion of their time on creating the future?
Are you (personally) a serf, a farmer, a hunter or a wizard?
What about the people you work with every day?
If you quit your job today, could you get a decent job as a farmer or a hunter?
If you could hire anyone in the world to help your company, who would it be?
What's stopping you from hiring someone that good?
If an omniscient wizard walked into your offices and described the future and told you what to do to prepare for it, would your company be able to change in response to his vision?
How can your company dramatically lower the cost of launching a test?
Are there five areas in your company that would benefit from fast feedback loops?
Are you building all your systems around testing and ignorance?
Are you hiding from the market?
Have you ever tried sushi?
If you could acquire another company's mDNA, whose would you choose?
Why don't you do that?
Are the economies of scale really as big as you think they are?
Is this project going to benefit from the learning it creates?
In what markets could your marketing efforts enter runaway?
How much time does senior management spend with unhappy customers?
What do you do with complaint letters?
What are you measuring?
Are you being selfish with your personal mDNA?
Have you institutionalized the process of sharing what you learn?
Are you focusing too much?
Are you the first choice among job seekers who have the mDNA you seek?
Are you the first choice among employers that have the winning strategy you seek?
What do you need to do to become the first choice?
Do you zoom?

Glossary

Author's Note

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Acknowledgments

Index