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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.
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.
This article is an Epic Pivot.
"That's the way to do it" - Punch
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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
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.
Lots of companies pivot and fail too. There is confirmation bias at work here- nobody hears about all the failures unless they burn through a bunch of venture capitol or something...
love is just extroverted narcissism
Pet peeve: Blockbuster did not dig in their heels. They spent hundreds of millions trying to build a streaming service in 1998/1999, prior to Netflix. Their contractor turned out to be be running a giant scam (not just on Blockbuster, it was a multi-billion dollar scam), and took their money and market position and blew it.
Look, there are plenty of examples of companies failing to anticipate the future, there's no reason to conflate that with the ones that fail to correctly implement what they can see.
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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
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
A lot of the times, the "pivot" is to fire everyone and sell the office equipment.