Adam Markel uses lifeguarding at a crowded beach with 100,000 summer visitors to explain how businesses need to anticipate problems like rip currents, called "sucks," and disrupt themselves before competitors do. Improvisation and equipment matter less than spotting danger first.
Chapters
When you have accountability, you also can do other things that you can't do without it, like take risks. Without that kind of a structure in place, it's very difficult for a business to take risks. You cannot play the game of business Today on defense, the world is changing too rapidly. That's why I wrote this book about pivot, about the fact that things are disrupting our environment so quickly. We look at that environment on that picture. That was the. When I said to. Y' all worked at a very busy ocean beach. That is a picture of our beach. That is 100,000 people on the beach on a typical Saturday or Sunday in the summer. You barely even see in between them. How on Earth could 20 lifeguards cover that span of beach? The model that I'm sharing with you is exactly how we did it. It's how we did it. But I'll tell you one thing. We didn't allow the mark, the forces of nature, which were all around us, to dictate what we would do. We got in front of it, we got ahead of it, which is exactly what's happening in the marketplace that's changing so rapidly. Technology advances and things are changing. Things are being disrupted so fast, and so many people are waiting to see what's going to happen next so that they can react to it. If we'd have waited on the beach for the riptides to show up, because they came and went. I'm going to show you some video in a second, what that looks like. They showed up and then they disappeared. If we waited for that to happen, it would have been too late. We never would have been able to cover all those people, all those souls that were in the water. So let's go ahead and queue up this first video. Just give you a sense of. People had been asking me for years. I just wanted to see what a rescue at our beach looked like. And this is a fairly mild one. But this guy's in trouble. Got a lifeguard who spots it. Two guys have swum out, and he's a big fellow and he's struggling. He's probably grabbing on because I see my lifeguards are under the water, their heads are under. So he might even have one of them there. So another guy, another lifeguard comes out with a buoy, another piece of equipment. We had surfboards, we had boats, we had rope, as you're going to see now, this guy, there's four lifeguards out there, and they run a line out to him to help pull him in. And now they're standing and you think, everything's okay right now watch. Not quite yet. Yeah, because you get crashed with a wave like that on the shore, you break a neck. Lots of things can happen. So we needed to be looking at that environment and improvising. So improvisation. I think I heard maybe it was Denise that said that earlier. But improvising is so important when it comes to pivotability. And the other thing is disrupting that environment beforehand. So I'll show you one more picture. So, as I said, we would have riptides that we called sucks. And the reason we called them sucks was because what happens is the current would suck out the water, and when it was churning and sucking, that water color would change. So from the lifeguard stand, we could see brown or a darker color water. And we knew right there that one of these rip currents was forming, and somebody was gonna go from 3ft of water where they could stand to 10ft deep, 20 yards offshore, and they'd be panicking. Now, as it turned out, we blew whistles. We got guys in the water for this guy. And in the end, the wave brought him in, and he just stood up. It's like, hey, what are you guys doing here? You know, that's the lookie game. But we were there anyway. And so disrupting that environment was so important ahead of waiting for Mother Nature to disrupt the environment or disrupt us.
