REFLECTING ON PIVOT

CONGRATULATIONS. You have made it to the end of the PIVOT journey and are now ready to sit back and bask in the glow of your 8× multiplier and adoring network—you know, the one that’s creating all kinds of value for your firm.

Or maybe not quite yet.

More likely, you’re nurturing a fledgling network that will require a lot of care, attention, experimentation, and iteration to grow into a healthy business unit. And when it does, it may still be only a small portion of your business. Although significant network investment should nudge your multiplier, you won’t see dramatic results until the core of your business itself has transformed to network orchestration.

But let’s not discount the hard thinking and hard work that your organization has done on this journey, with each piece contributing to a clearer vision of the present and future. In the Pinpoint step, we hope you took a stark look at yourself and your organization, asked the honest questions, and judged fairly the kind of business model and mental model your organization uses, and why. When you did the Inventory step, you took the time to carefully sort out all your firm’s assets, even those you didn’t think were assets the week before.

To Visualize your network, you started thinking about the future, shaping a new business model in which value can be co-created and shared between your organization and a network. The Operate step helped you create a plan to realize this vision, and the Track step guided you in creating the metrics and experiments to shape and grow it.

We know from experience in working with leaders and boards that this work is difficult and exhausting. Consciously shifting one’s mental model requires levels of openness and perseverance that most people struggle to attain. You may not have done this work perfectly, but that is a part of the process. It’s a process—just like growing a network—that’s endless.

We encourage you to keep at it. Grow the business you have started, learn, and repeat in other parts of the business, with other networks. Creating the second network goes faster than creating the first one; the third, faster still, as you become more adept at the PIVOT process.

Great value is available in the network, and if your organization doesn’t access it, someone else will.