Seize the Moment

Years ago, when I was teaching at Georgetown, one of my students loaned me a book called The Medici Effect which I found to be pretty interesting. (One of the great things about my time at Georgetown, BTW, was that my students gave me as much reading as I gave them — and I loved it!) The author, Frans Johansson, offered up some great ideas about how to spark inspiration and encourage creativity and innovation. An updated version of the book came out this year, and I highly recommend it.

The Medici Effect is probably his most cited work, but the book he wrote after that, The Click Moment, offers incredibly valuable insights that are just as useful for managing your career as they are for managing your business.

Here’s a brief explanation of his later work:

In The Click Moment, Frans examines what makes a random combination or occurrence a “click moment” and how to take advantage of serendipity and chance.

Success, we’re told, is the outcome of careful planning, analysis, and strategy. But the truth is, success is far more random than we’d like to believe. In fact, in today’s complex, volatile, and random world, the five-year business plan is obsolete. Going through the motions can no longer guarantee strong performance. If planning is out the window, what do you have? According to Frans Johansson, look for “click moments”—rare opportunities, often serendipitous, to change course. In The Click Moment, he will discuss how to spot click moments and increase their occurrence in your life, how to place lots of high-potential bets, and how to leverage the complex forces that follow into a winning strategy.

Speaking as someone who has spent a career as a strategic planner, it pains me to think that “planning is out the window.” In many ways, though, I have seen this reality play out during my own professional life, both in the organizations for which I worked and in the way my career has evolved. I wrote about this a bit in my own book about my marathon running experiences, and it came up yesterday at a talk I was giving at a bank in Manila, when someone asked about making career and life transitions. The Idea I suggested was to avoid preparing for a straight-line career path, because disruptive things happen (e.g., automation, politics, new personal tech) that you cannot control, and if you have only prepared for one option, you may get left behind. It’s better, I think, to prepare yourself holistically — through education, experiences, hobbies, the friends and other connections you make — so you are ready to take advantage of whatever opportunities come along.

You can learn more about Johansson’s books and his ideas on his website.