Think Like a Startup (eBook)

Get Agile and Unleash Your Inner Entrepreneur

Steve Sammartino (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2020 | 2. Auflage
240 Seiten
Wiley (Verlag)
978-0-7303-8198-3 (ISBN)

Infos

Reboot your entrepreneurial spirit and excel in the digital age

The days of being locked into a single career for life are long gone. It's time to reinvent yourself, transform your life and work the new economy for everything it's worth.

With the industrial age quickly vanishing in the rearview mirror, Think Like a Startup is your instruction manual for hacking your mind and acquiring the skills to take control of your life and fortunes in the digital age.

Inspirational, subversive, and with a wealth of insightful guidance, Think Like a Startup will help you to break from a lifetime of legacy programming and take full advantage of the technology revolution.

Steve Sammartino is a renowned futurist, technologist and a born entrepreneur with an uncanny ability to make sense of how emerging technology applies to any industry.

Textauszug

It's time to launch the Startup of you!

We are in the midst of a technological revolution. There is no doubt that our world is changing at a pace never before witnessed in human history. This is no longer controversial, or even debatable; it’s a mere fact. We’ve seen it in our own lives. Innovations that would have seemed unimaginable even 10 years ago are now widely available, affordable and so much a part of our daily life that we imagine we couldn’t live without them. But it’s still early days. We’re only 20 years into this, and let’s not forget that the automobile didn’t arrive until 150 years after the start of the industrial revolution.

This technological shift is impacting us all at a societal and economic level, changing the very nature of the lives we live, including of course how we earn a living. No one is immune. Incredible changes are being introduced in every industry, every business model, every job. This is because everyone is sharing the same core digital technologies.

This revolution is open to everyone who chooses to participate. But we need to reboot the entrepreneurial spirit every one of us was born with, because school, with all its good intentions, has not prepared us for this.

STEM is not enough

As the birth child of the industrial revolution, school taught us survival skills for a bygone era. Educators and governments have deftly moved to ensure the graduates of tomorrow arrive prepared for the technological era by focusing on what they call STEM subjects — Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths. The problem is that STEM is not enough. In fact, this re-emphasis, on its own, really won’t help much at all, because it is just more of what we’ve been taught historically, with a different angle of approach. What we need to do is add the two missing E’s of Economics and Entrepreneurship, so STEM becomes ESTEEM.

By adding the missing E’s, we have a chance to build people’s esteem. We give people an opportunity to become more human and to live an adventure as modern-day economic explorers carving out a new path for themselves. When we share the lost arts of entrepreneurship and self-reliance, a spark we all had as kids is reignited so brightly that it becomes a beacon to guide others.

ESTEEM recognises that we need each other, that some non-technical skills, as you’ll see, create value that makes previously invisible STEM visible. They create more value than is offered by anything else we attempt, because without the spirit of exploration, even in an economic sense, we’d all still be living in caves. Building an economy around the idea of ESTEEM means appreciating the wide variety of viewpoints and natural faculties we have to offer. Tech Hackers, Design Hipsters and Sales Hustlers meet in the middle and make something great together. When we add the missing E’s we give everyone who believes they have a chance a tilt at an independent future. If we want future-proof kids, and grown-ups, we all need ESTEEM.

For too long science and maths have been largely ignored in wider society. We glorify celebrity and sporting achievement, but technologists are rarely recognised. I’ve lost count of how many sports people have been named Australian of the Year; it really is ‘fall of Rome’ stuff. But it does feel like the tide is turning. As end users of technology, society is starting to value science on a personal level, and it’s about time. More and more kids are learning to code, to hack, to experiment with robotics — it feels like an exciting shift. But if we reconfigure their minds only to science, without addressing economics and entrepreneurship, we are still just teaching them to participate in someone else’s game, and we all deserve more than that.

We need to be able to take what we know and convert it into income, to participate in the market not only to get a good job but also to create jobs for ourselves and others. Even better, we can look towards inventing new industries that don’t even exist yet, and all the technology in the world can’t do that, because technology without practical application, in the form of customers and a market, is just a discovery. The people developing the wizardry of tomorrow deserve to be the beneficiaries of what they create. In fact, anyone doing anything deserves the dignity of knowing how to manage their own future, and this is what Think Like a Startup is all about.

Time to unlearn

For the sake of collective progress, let’s assume we’re all late to the party. We probably should have started a little earlier on all this. Yes, there’s always someone who knows more and started before us — so what? Let’s agree that the second best time to start is now. And the first thing we have to do before anything else is unlearn the way we think. In order to reinvent ourselves, we need to wipe our human hard drive clean of all the useless files we’ve been carrying around since school. Some of them are heavy and slowing us down. We need to remember that our training to follow a linear path is obsolete. With some simple knowledge hacks, we can reframe what looks risky and pursue a new path.

Today’s playbook can be learned relatively quickly, once we free our mind from what we have been told. It’s low cost and has a high return on time invested. The least anyone willing to have a crack at reinventing themselves can expect is that they’ll get a very nice ROH (return on humanity). Sometimes the having is in the doing, and by doing more than you’ve done in the past, you’ll become more than you were and will feel pride at having had the guts to try. And some strange things happen when we invest in ourselves. We gain a great deal of self-esteem, and our own economics improves because we know, and others sense, we are the kind of person to make an effort. It’s the same feeling you get when you’ve prepared well for anything: suddenly the outcome doesn’t seem as important, although we are often happy with it.

You’ve already got the skills you need. If you can read, you can do it. I really mean that. This revolution is one that connects skills and people, and we all need each other. But if you can dig up some deeply buried desire for risk, some courage and a bit of the creative spirit you had as a five-year-old, then I know you’ll seize the opportunity that being connected to everyone in the world can bring. It’s an opportunity no generation before ours ever had.

The history of the present

Before we can unlearn anything, we need to know why we sometimes think the way we do. We need to be able to see through the system that shaped us. School is a good place to start.

The first thing you need to know about school is this:

School was not designed with you in mind.

They designed it for them. You might be wondering who ‘they’ actually are. Well, ‘they’, in the developed world at least, are the governments and the industrialists and business leaders who own and control the factors of production. School as we know it was designed to create competent, compliant workers who could fit into the rapidly industrialising world.

Before the industrial revolution there was a very high probability that people would simply do what their parents did, especially if it involved agriculture or a craft. They would follow family tradition, the required skills usually handed down from parents or close relatives. Or they’d work in the family business, most often eking out a living with the primary focus of providing for the food, clothing and lodging to sustain their family. There wasn’t much excess for the working classes, but there was a fair amount of freedom.

Why change hurts

If you’re wondering why change is so hard for us to cope with, it’s because we’ve been programmed for stability, indoctrinated from the age of innocence to believe in a system that is now obsolete. From the moment we are capable of comprehension, we are shaped into little industrialised robots awaiting instructions from the corporate or governmental algorithm. It’s not our fault that change is so uncomfortable. The 200 years of the industrial era, despite its world wars and depressions, led to a long period of systemic stability and unsurpassed material prosperity. For many generations we have had the formula for living an increasingly prosperous life, and the industrial revolution delivered against this promise big time.

As I wrote in my first book, The Great Fragmentation, we now live better than royalty did before this revolution, and anything that threatens to upend that comfort is fearsome. We fret at the possibility of change not only because we’ve never had it so good, but because we’ve been told all our lives to leave the big important stuff to the people in charge of the systems in which we obediently participate. Economically we have been coddled, so much so that we have come to believe our system was designed to serve us in perpetuity. It’s now clear that is not going to be the case. The system is changing dramatically, and we need to change our personal business models to recognise this. We have a choice:

We can wait for the system to get better.

Or we can reinvent ourselves, redesigning our lives and in the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 7.1.2020
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Beruf / Finanzen / Recht / Wirtschaft ► Bewerbung / Karriere
• Themenwelt: Sachbuch/Ratgeber ► Gesundheit / Leben / Psychologie ► Lebenshilfe / Lebensführung
• ISBN-10: 0-7303-8198-6 / 0730381986
• ISBN-13: 978-0-7303-8198-3 / 9780730381983