Seth Godin: Agent of Change

Seth Godin, author of many marketing books including IdeaVirus, heralds the concept of zooming and change. In this interview from 800CEOread.com, Seth discusses how in today's situation you have to constantly re-invent yourself. (Something that Tom Peters hardly concurs with).

SG: The bad news about packaged goods companies is, they built their business model around something that was true a hundred years ago. Just because they were really successful and really profitable selling sugar water, doesn’t mean that that’s a guarantee it’s going to be true in the future. Procter & Gamble is sucking wind, and will probably do so for the foreseeable future, because the mantra of supermarkets and television aren’t what’re driving our economy anymore, but that’s what drives their companies. So when I look at, "Can I use my cell phone to buy something from a Coke machine?" I think that’s sort of a cool innovation, and it’s probably going to happen. But it’s not going to change the dynamic of their business in a big way, in my humble opinion. If I were one of those packaged goods companies, I’d be scrambling as hard as I can to say, "How can we be in a completely different business five years from now?" If we’re going to be in a completely different business five years from now, we better start now trying lots of little things so that we know what the big thing’s going to be when we need it.