A 5 Minute Overview Of
Simply Brilliant
How Great Organizations Do Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Ways
About the Author
William Taylor is a speaker and entrepreneur. He was a cofounder and founding editor of Fast Company which sold for
$340 million six years after it commenced publication. Since starting Fast Company, Bill Taylor has written three books on leadership and change including Practically Radical and Mavericks at Work. He currently blogs and writes feature articles for the Harvard Business Review and writes a column for the Sunday Business section of The New York Times titled Under New Management. He is a graduate of Princeton University and the MIT School of Management.
The Main Idea
Everyone assumes that to be part of a great success story today, you have to be involved in a technology-driven start-up that is part of the "new economy" and which is doing something highly disruptive. That's not really the case.
The future is open to everyone – even those who are working in very mundane fields. It's not just the start-ups which can apply radical creativity. Breakthroughs can be achieved in any industry where leaders are willing to reimagine what's possible and turn their product or service into something which is simply brilliant.
To excel today, find a way to refresh your product or experience. Don't settle for average, work to make what you offer simply brilliant. It can be done.
There is no such thing as an average or old-fashioned business, just average or old-fashioned ways to do business. In fact, the opportunity to reach for extraordinary may be most pronounced in settings that have been far too ordinary for far too long. If how you think shapes how you compete, then it should be easier to compete in fields locked in to old ways of thinking.
Today, average is officially over. Being average just won’t earn you what it used to. It can’t when so many more employers have so much more access to so much more [above-average] cheap foreign labor, cheap robotics, cheap software, cheap automation, and cheap genius. Therefore, everyone needs to find their extra—their unique value contribution that makes them stand out.
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