Only the creative survive.
Do a quick search and take a look at the images.
Hundreds of climbers queued in line.
Pushing and shoving.
Stepping over dead bodies.
To reach the summit of Mount Everest.
And take selfies.
How did scaling the world’s highest mountain turn from a daring challenge?
One that landed a handful of mountaineers in history books.
Into recreational tourism for the Instagram crowd?
Simple.
An unrestrained dance of desires.
Adventure-seeking climbers.
Dollar-seeking Nepalese.
And every entrepreneurial facilitator in between.
29,029 feet of free market capitalism.
And a perfect metaphor.
For what every entrepreneur and enterprise is going to face in the age of A.I.
Because as soon as you create something of value.
Imitators are going to show up and crowd the mountain.
It’s happening in every domain.
From healthcare and transportation.
To education, entertainment, and mind-body-spirit offerings.
Even creative pursuits.
Like art, music, writing, and design.
In the late 80s, one of Intel’s founders wrote, “Only the Paranoid Survive.”
A best-selling management book on how to bridge the narrow line.
Between catastrophe and opportunity.
In his book, Andrew Grove wrote:
“Businesses fail either because they leave their customers, or because their customers leave them!”
Pretty simple, huh?
Grove defined a two-step approach to making strategic decisions.
And preventing that loss.
Step one is to identify what he called strategic inflection points, or SIPs.
An order-of-magnitude change in a company’s “environment.”
Competitors, suppliers, customers, potential competitors, providers of substitutes, complementors.
A change to any of these parameters is a change to the environment.
We are living in an age of SIPs.
If you can’t see it, you’re asleep.
Going through the motions.
Hoping and praying that you will, somehow… survive.
Grove’s second step is to make a decision.
To consider that your business could be done a different way.
And then to be brave enough to do it!
There’s an old proverb:
“When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.”
Do you see?
There’s no need to be paranoid today.
Because change isn’t a possibility to fear.
It’s a reality to embrace.
One in which…
Only the creative survive.
Stay passionate!
Ironic story about Intel. What he described is exactly what happened to Intel after Grove left, first by missing mobile (by not investing in RISC/low power chips and instead trying too hard to stick to x86), and later by missing AI. The should have spun out foundery services to compete with TSMC over a decade ago. Of course, seeing this now is obvious but seeing it ahead of time is difficult.
Mt Everest — from a climbing challenge to recreational tourism? I don't think so. Approximately 7,000+/- humans have climbed Everest, and 340+/- climbers have died on the mountain. About 1 in 20 aspirants gave their lives to the challenge. (A lot of Instagram photos are untaken.) And why have so many tried? IMO, it concerns the aspirational aspects of "Want." There is a need/want to be recognized. With 8,000,000,000,000 people in the world, it is increasingly difficult to be recognized. But you can do things that don't require extraordinary intelligence, unique athletic ability, or special talents — run a marathon, jump into the Artic Ocean wearing only your Speedo, skydive from an airplane in Kenya, or take an Instagram photo atop MT Everest.