Organizations today are struggling to navigate a rapidly changing landscape. Customers are more empowered and competitors more disruptive. There is a new logic of value creation requiring exponential growth and transformative change. You have to change what you do, but first you have to change how you think.
WHAT IS SHIFT THINKING?
Shift Thinking™ is a method and a mindset for success in a digital age.
Our mission is to expand the capacity for exponential growth and transformative change. We help leaders and teams unlearn outdated mental models and replace them with more powerful ways of thinking.
By studying the success of market leaders and the nature of digital technology, we have discovered a new logic of value creation. This logic applies to how companies engage their customers, organize their talent, and compete in the marketplace.
Customers are no longer passive consumers; they are co-creators. Brands can’t just broadcast to audiences by pushing messages; they must create communities that pull customers into orbit as an ongoing relationship.
Read More About Engage
For organizations, the management imperative is no longer consistency, but flexibility. Old models relied on a linear process to maximize control; new models of governance empower teams and achieve alignment and autonomy.
Read More About Organize
It’s not enough to create value with a superior product. You need to enable others to create value around a shared purpose. Supply chains and distribution channels are giving way to ecosystems and business platforms.
Read More About Compete
Learn About Shift Thinking
Discover how you can go beyond best practice to next practice by reading these selected articles from Mark Bonchek’s regular column in the Harvard Business Review and exploring the Writing section of the site.
Read More Shift Thinking Articles →
Lead
How to Build a Strategic Narrative
Discover how to create a narrative that energizes your executives, inspires employees, excites partners, and attracts customers.
Find Your Shared Purpose
Most leaders think of purpose as a purpose for. But what is needed is a purpose with. Developing a shared purpose is the critical for connecting with customers and employees in the social age.
Engage
Build Your Brand as a Relationship
The way we think about brands need to change. In the past, they were objects or concepts. You had a relationship with a brand. But in this social age, brands are the relationships. By defining a brand’s particular kind of relationship, companies can create greater engagement, differentiation, and loyalty.
Why Gratitude Trumps Loyalty
What does brand loyalty mean in a digital age? It’s not enough to have repeat transactions. You need reciprocity, advocacy and an ongoing relationship built around a shared purpose. How? With gratitude.
Learn how to shift from push to pull and generate gravity for your brand.
Organize
Use Doctrine to Pierce the Fog of Business
How can you push decision-making closer to the ground while still ensuring that team members make the right decisions? Doctrine, a concept borrowed from the military, offers a powerful way to exert influence without centralized control.
Can Bigger Be Faster?
Organizations today need to be big and fast. To mitigate the tradeoffs between size and speed, agility and scalability, many are shifting from hierarchies to networks, choosing a better leadership model for the 21st century.
Unlearn
What Kind of Thinker Are You?
You know what your colleagues do, but do you know how they think? We’ve reinvented Myers-Briggs to be simpler, more useful and more relevant for collaboration. Discover how to work better together.
Selling a New Way of Thinking
Do you have an innovative idea or solution? Your value proposition won’t be enough to persuade buyers or users. You need to give them a new mental model. Learn the three steps to Shift Thinking.
Video on Thinking Styles from Harvard Business
Compete
The Social Network of Things
Instead of The Internet of Things, leaders should be thinking about the Social Network of Things. But connected products aren’t the same as social products. The real revolution will come when objects are collaborating around a shared purpose.
Little Data Makes Big Data More Powerful
Big data is what organizations know about people. Little data is what we know about ourselves. If you want to build loyalty, spend less time using data to tell customers about you, and spend more time telling them something about themselves.