Slashdot Mirror
In Our Cynical Age, No One Fails Anymore -- Everybody 'Pivots' (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: The "pivot" has assumed a peculiar place in our common lexicon. A word once used to describe a guard angling for position on the basketball court is now in wide circulation in politics and business. That's especially the case in Silicon Valley, where pivoting has become the new failure, a concept to describe a haphazard, practically madcap form of iterative development. With its sheen of management-speak, pivoting is well suited to our moment. And like any act of public relations, pivoting is also a performance. A key part of the act is acknowledging that you are doing it while trying to recast the effort as something larger, more sophisticated, highly planned. The pivot, though it arises from desperation, is nevertheless supposed to appear methodical. The word seems to have first gained currency in Silicon Valley through the efforts of Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup." Ries defines pivoting as "a change in strategy without a change in vision." Many successful start-ups now claim a pivot as their origin story. Slack began its life as a video-game company before realizing that its actual value might lie in a chat app the company used to communicate internally. The company is now considered to be worth at least $5 billion, putting it among the most successful pivoters of all time. (Other web staples -- YouTube, Groupon, Instagram -- began life in vastly different iterations before pivoting into their current forms.) There's a promise of technocratic efficiency with pivoting, that all you require is a good business plan, and perhaps another injection of venture capital, and you can transform yourself overnight.
Sounds like they're a successful company if one of their products didn't pan out but a different venture of theirs did. Did they still pivot and not fail if they just went bankrupt?
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How are you supposed to use the word "fail" in a PowerPoint to peddle VCs money???
We used to just call that 'reinventing ourselves'
I am pivoting the plan. Pray, I do not pivot it further. You know it would be unfortunate if I had to leave a McKinsey garrison here.
I need a hero
I'm holdin' out for a hero 'til the end of the night
and he's gotta be strong
and he's gotta be fast
and he's gotta be fresh from the fight
First post!
You pivoted it!
This article is an Epic Pivot.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
folks not accepting responsibility for negative outcomes is hardly new. OTOH 'pivot' doesn't always mean that. It also means "X didn't work out so let's go do Y". Apple 'pivoted' from a general PC manufacturer to a boutique electronics company and it worked out pretty well for them. Meanwhile Blockbuster dug their heels in and we can see how well that turned out.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
That doesn't mean what you think it does. Trying to make the best narrative of course change doesn't seem "cynical" to me.
That's an Epic Pivot for you.
Nah, it sounds wrong.
#DeleteFacebook
What do you think about an organization like moz://a?
At first they didn't have much success. Mozilla Suite didn't see much use.
But then they got lucky with Firefox. It actually managed to get approximately 35% of the browser market at its peak. This allowed them to sign some lucrative deals with Google, and then Yahoo.
However, since then we've seen Firefox's market share drop off severely. The latest stats put it at maybe 5%, if we're feeling generous. They have essentially no mobile presence.
We haven't seen much happen with their other projects. Thunderbird was mildly successful, but it has essentially been abandoned. Bugzilla is seen as a relic now. SeaMonkey is quite irrelevant.
They've had a project like Persona, that really went nowhere. Firefox OS was pretty much a disaster.
Now we see them wasting resources on their Rust programming language, and the Servo browser engine they're writing in Rust. Neither of these projects is making any impressive progress.
Lately we've seen them expand into questionable things like "battling information pollution", and changing their logo to the absurd "moz://a".
Should these various efforts, including the failed ones, be considered "pivots"?
Their current deal with Yahoo is to end in 2019, I believe. With Firefox's ever-dropping market share, and no mobile presence, I find it hard to believe that any company would want to sign a similar deal with moz://a. Even if a deal were signed, I can't see it being as lucrative as their past deals. After all, a browser with 2% or less of the market is pretty much irrelevant.
What would they "pivot" to doing if Firefox ends up with essentially no users?
If they "pivot" to so-called "social justice" initiatives and other politically-driven causes, should they even be considered a software or a technology company any longer?
Instead of tennis balls they got potatoes shipped to them. So they said fuck it and sliced 'em up.
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. . . and so have my businesses. Early and often. I think the reason I have had success is that I know the difference between success and failure, and learn from the latter to get the former.
Still not sure about this "pivoting," though.
You probably don't award anyone but shareholders for success.
if you learn from your failures, you will be much better off in the long term.
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Look, it is not true that no one fails. Tons of people fail. ISIS has failed. Radio Shack has failed. Sears has failed.
But once someone fails, we stop talking about them (with the possible exception of politicians.) So you stop thinking about them.
That only leaves the successful people. By definition, they did not fail, no matter how badly a previous project went. They overcame their failure and went on to success, usually by taking what they learned and trying something different.
This is the exact same the thing that every one else has done. ALL THE TIME. The company "3M" failed to create a super strong adhesive for use in the aerospace industry, so they took what they did create and "pivoted" into post it notes.
George Washington failed almost all his battles, but took what he learned and pivoted into a sneak attack at Valley Forge. Coca Cola failed at "New Coke" but pivoted back into success.
This is not a new thing, it is just a new word for something that everyone has been doing for thousands of years.
And a fool that is wining about successful people overcoming their mistakes instead of 'admitting' they failed.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
A rose by any other name would smell as fail.
This is what happens when everyone that is given a participation trophy grows up. They try and change the use of language to remove the concept of failure.
There are many, many, many, times I failed. I tried to learn something from those failures, usually afterwards, with lots of retrospection, regret, and alcohol, but they were still complete and utter disasters. To call them a "pivot" is silly, even though they all involved major changes after the chips fell. This is both personally, and in terms of decisions I made for my software company.
I apologize - I was only able to make it through the first two paragraphs of this article before I was reminded of why I do not subscribe to the New York Times, and pivoted to writing a comment.
Sounds more like he used the money from one business that is slowing down and moved to a new better business with higher profit dollars. The more you earn the more you can do. It is why the 1% don't think twice about bankruptcy as it still leaves them with millions in assets to rebuild with.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
Going down in flames from conducting business as usual is something people want to avoid. For this reason, they radically modify their strategy to succeed. Such adaptations are now classified as "pivots" but it's just an attempt to optimize your actions to achieve your goals (which may also change). This isn't new for businesses, it's just become more public due to the volatile nature of places like Silicon Valley.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Failure sounds so final. "You failed at that." "Fail? My first plan didn't work out, I learned a lot and used that knowledge to do this other thing well."
Is this a subtle way of suggesting that Slashdot pivoted from beta and that it was not a failure?
I often here CEOs proudly brag about "building the plane in the air".
You know why Boeing or Airbus don't build planes in the air? BECAUSE IT IS A HORRIBLE WAY TO BUILD A PLANE.
Actually there is an Oracle clause called pivot, that can come in quite handy sometimes.
folks not accepting responsibility for negative outcomes is hardly new.
That implies judgement. Sometimes, things just happen that cannot be predicted - actually nothing can be predicted because no one can predict the future; obviously. But in out twisted shallow culture, we are expected to predict the future and failure is a character flaw.
The person who takes a risk ( taking a chance on the unknowable future) and succeeds, is considered a genius. The person who fails - and maybe ends up in the street - is someone who made "poor life choices".
Tesla. It's a long shot - let's be real. Even if Musk does make 500,00 cars per year, what makes him think he'll sell that many every year?
Maybe. Maybe not. (S's only do about 80K per year at best. The 3's? We'll see.)
If he succeeds, he and his investors will look like geniuses.
If he fails, he and his investors will look like a bunch of dreaming morons.
The truth, he took a risk - a chance - and he and his investors are neither geniuses nor idiots.
There is too much capriciousness in life for anyone to be even 50% responsible for what happens to them. And to judge people accordingly is delusional and harsh. And it shows life hasn't kicked you in the balls - yet. Wait it'll come.
So, I remember 25+ years ago a manager using pivot to mostly mean "place in your implementation plan where you could still have some flexibility in what you were doing but doesn't need to be decided now", with the "pivot points" being the point at which you assessed your options and decided which way to proceed.
As much as the assholes in business, and especially in Silly-coin valley, can make certain terms trite and overused ... I'm pretty sure this was being used in engineering parlance at least 30 years ago to describe "this or that" choices in a process that didn't need to be made yet.
In this case it's being applied retroactively to sound like "oh, we planned it that way". But, really, it was being used as "when we get here we'll do one of these options but for now we're not committed and we don't need to choose yet".
Maybe the business people just stole a term from the engineering folks? When I first heard it, basketball was not even remotely a context I would have known about (I had to google it), and it was purely a degree of flexibility which still existed and which could be deferred for now.
As much as I cringe about most business speak, this one actually matches engineering speak from a fair ways back. And most definitely not by people making basketball references.
In my experience, the business side of the house steals terminology from the tech side of the house and then over-uses them, and this seems like one of those.
There is a strange notion that direct admission of failure is virtuous, and people who are quick to do this are reliable and successful.
In reality...people respond to spin. Spindoctoring is a necessary skill in many endeavors. Saying the word "failure" can drive investors or clients away, whereas saying the exact same thing in nicer-sounding words can retain access to funding that is needed to succeed.
Generally speaking, the more successful a person is, the better at spindoctoring they are. This has nothing to do with cynicism, and everything to do with how people respond to language.
That's all.
http://www.comedycentral.co.uk...
in ballroom dancing (foxtrot, waltz). Though I knew need to keep knees flexed, maintain consistent connection with dance partner along with "step into her and go around, she steps into me and go around" instead a twirl-twirl. The key item I learned when she goes around, I need to think of going forward on the left (but not really), and this was the big breakthrough for me. Unfortunately had to wait 17% into the 21st century to really get the feel.
mfwright@batnet.com
If you change your goals, its a failure? Sure, maybe. But its a failure at something you don't care about anymore.
That's why they don't call it a failure. They use a more descriptive word because they have a writing vocabulary larger than say.. an average New York times blogger.
The most important part of the article:
Which brings us to Donald Trump,
For crying out loud, really? TFA played the Trump card? Time to tear down the internet and start over. I don't want to live here anymore.
Pivoting and Spinning are just modern synonyms for Lying
Liars are doomed to fail, so just drop the bullshit and try to fucking be honest
You may deal with some crybabies who would rather be lied to at first, but in the long run things will become much better
> that all you require is a good business plan, and perhaps another injection of venture capital, and you can transform yourself overnight.
No, you need customers, only things you need. If there is none or not enough in what you're doing, aim differently to reach them.
"Science will win because it works." - Stephen Hawking
Seriously, you're citing basketball as the origin of this term?
A word 400 years old, coming from French, that means to rotate or change direction, now has become owned by a sport?
The Quirkz Handbook of Self-Improvement for People Who Are Already Pretty Okay
Table-ized A.I.
"fail" you have to TRY something.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw2qEUwFbGM
(Garfunkel and Oats "You are such a loser" ... one of the most inspiring pieces if music i have heard recently)
AC
So, Mr Subjective, tell us how you really feel about Perl 6.
I propose the Lavish Praise programming language.
It stands for "LISP admittedly very impressive shit hot", although "perhaps Rust augments industrial systems engineering".
Happens every decade or so they change all the buzzwords to make bad shit sound benign. You new here?
"When you fall down, quick, pick up something and hold it aloft shouting "EUREKA!" and pretend you MEANT to fall down"
Thanks Greg. I've gotten away with more mistakes that way.
Only reference I once knew was the pivot man in a circle jerk.
Silicon Valley - Pied Piper needs to pivot?
If you want to read about someone pivoting from failure to failure, read "Steve Jobs & The NeXT Big Thing" by Randall Stross. I hated reading the first half of this book because of the author's axe grinding against Steve Jobs, as the narrative in other books are always sympathetic to Steve Jobs. The other half of the book is where Steve Jobs pivots from all the mistakes that would end up reducing NeXT from a computer company to a software company. This book stops several years before Apple buys out NeXT and Pixar became successful. For that story, and my favorite Steve Jobs book, you need to read "The Second Coming of Steve Jobs" by Alan Deutschman.
No null checks for speaker or speaker.phraseSpoken or comments saying they'll always be non-null. The pivot check only looks for lowercase. Sigh.
It's now going to be a cute little Pivot Porpoise.
Pivot?
As far as I'm concerned they can just swivel.
explained it better
Everyone pivots, no one every throws good money after bad anymore! And I've got a couple of bridges to sell you.
"Contains" processes it case-neutral. Mass null-checks are only for stupid API's. Good ones rarely need them. Some fockers like to type and read bloat all day.
Table-ized A.I.
I flip-flop.
It's because participation trophies are being handed out to the precious snowflakes.
When the right makes excuses, it's because they're adapting to the tough deal that was handed to them which was no fault of their own.
to point out when this affects others, dear.
This is 100% BS Survival Bias. You don't hear about the 90% who failed because they've failed. They've failed to even show you that they've failed.
Every time you see a store close down and newer one getting in (ex: a new Walmart), there's a high chance it is because the old one failed. It could be financial, commercial, management, competition or other cause of failure, but we will never know. This is especially when no one likes to talk about failure.
News like "nytimes" and the media don't show it because it is not exciting to talk about failure. Have the media ever show the the 4th, 5th and 10th winner of a contents? no? That basically proves the point.
The internet is wide enough to show the other side. There are still plenty of failure. In Our Cynical Age, A Lot Still Fail -- Everybody 'Hides in a Corner' when they do.
While pivoting is not really new, it now happens more often (sometimes multiple times for the same company) and it no longer unusual for a pivot to have little at all to do with the original idea.
If it costs years and tens of millions of dollars to reach product, you don't generally see dramatic pivots. But when you can reach product in months with handful of employees and no capital equipment, the team becomes the most valuable asset. Preserve that in you pivot and you really haven't lost much. That's a far cry from specialized machinery, purpose built buildings, and years of non-transferable research. In the later case, you are likely to see product refinement in pursuit of a somewhat different market but not a full scale pivot where you throw almost everything out and start over.
As much as I enjoy new technology and cool gadgets, I hate the trendy, buzzword-addled proteges, behaving as though their new app is going to improve mankind.
They used to be mocked, as the stuff they touted was already done by existing software, but now everyone is itching to make big money by jumping on the latest bandwagon before the IPO.
Now all I see around me are young, hipster douchebags in skinny jeans and needing a haircut, tweeting to each other about how it's all integrated and "just works."
I wasted too much of my life in this industry to deal with this until I retire. This curmudgeonly old-schooler needs a new career. I won't call this one a failure, just a pivot to something better.
While this is an excellent example of silicon valley BS-speak that really means something else, it reminds me a lot of the right-wing code words we hear so often these days: "law and order," "unity," "freedom," etc. We all know what these words really mean, when spoken by certain people.
But, these phrases were all chosen for the honor of being used to cover up dumbness for a reason - because they do represent good ideas, when they are used genuinely and not as some flimsy sheep's clothing for something else. Much like freedom, pivots are good - when they are real. They *can* represent innovation, humility and persistence. Netflix used to send me DVDs in the mail, but they pivoted into the world's streaming overlord. A previous poster mentioned others, all valid.
I'd probably try to focus fire on the hypocrisy of the cover-up rather than on the cover being used.
Q1: What do you do when your business plan is failing, but you have an excellent group of motivated people working for you?
A1: Try another plan.
Q2: What happens when that plan starts to fail?
A2: See Answer 1.
Happens all the time, at least to a well-led company.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
Yeah, remember the pair of you are both pivoting around a point (as a pair), not you pivoting around a point on your own feet...
Capitalism is great if you have capital.
putting the 'B' in LGBTQ+
I had never heard of those two before, and wondered, "Did Art Garfunkel and John Oates...?" Quite glad to be wrong about that. :-D
I also recommend "The Loophole". It's clever, and they're kinda cute in those schoolgirl uniforms.
Thanks for the pointer.
I always win.
You are working on a project, then BAM it turns out that approach won't work. Then you pivot off in an alternate design approach and say all is good because "You Failed Fast!" Pivots are just a blame the system failure, that way everyone gets an I participated medal!