指尖阅读—你的生涯你做主（十二）

Detroits Are Everywhere

The story of Detroit isn’t simple. There are other complicating factors we haven’t mentioned in our brief sketch, and there are early indicators that things maybe improving. Nor is the Detroit story unique. We hold the auto industry up as an example teems with industries and companies that have experienced similarly precipitous declines. Once-great companies are falling both more frequently and more quickly than in times past. In the 1920s and ‘30s firms stayed in the S&P 500 for an average fo sixty-five years. By the late 1990s the average tenure was just ten years. John Seely Brown and John Hagel, of Deloitte, report that the topple rate – the rate at which big companies lose their leadership positions – has more than doubled over the past forty years. Today more than ever, “’winners’ have increasingly precarious positions.”

Why are so many winners ending up like Detroit? Each case is different, but underlying causes tend to include the hubris that comes from success, the failure to recognize and match competition, an unwillingness to exploit opportunities that contain risk, and an inability to adapt to relentless change. The forces of competition and change that brought down Detroit are global and local. They threaten every business, every industry, every city. And more important, they also threaten every individual, every career.

This is not a book about the economic history of Detroit. So why is Detroit important? Because no matter what city you live in, no matter what business orindustry you work for, no matter what kind of work you do – when it comes to your career ,right now, you may be heading down the same path as Detroit. The forces of change that toppled the once great city and industry risk toppling all of our careers – no matter how secure they may seem at the moment.

For tunately, there is another path – both metaphorically and physically thousands of miles away from Detroit. Silicon Valley has become the twenty-first-century model for entrepreneurship and progress and has had multiple generations of entrepreneurial companies over the decades: from Hewlett Packard’s founding in 1939 to Intel, Apple, Adobe, Genentch, AMD, Intuit, ORACLE, Electronic Arts,Pixar, and Cisco, and then to Googel, eBay, Yahoo, Seagate, and Salesforce, and then more recently to PayPal, Facebook, YouTube, Craigslist, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

In each passing decade, Silicon Valley has kept and intensified it sentrepreneurial mojo, with dozens of companies creating the future and adaptingto the evolution of the global market. These companies provide not only a new model for corporate innovation, but also the entrepreneur mind-set needed to succeed in individual careers.

What do these companies have in common? The principles of Silicon Valley are the principles in this book. Take intelligent and hold risks to accomplish something great. Build a network of alliances to help you with intelligence, resources, and collective action. Pivot to a break out opportunity.

You can think like a start-up, whoever you are and whatever you do. Anyone can apply this entrepreneurial skill set to his or her career. This is a book about how to do just that. It’s about keeping Detroit from happening to you and making the Silicon Valley way work for you.