Pivot
Pivoting, or changing course, is often something people and organizations feel ashamed to do. Nathan recalls the moment when, standing in the back of the room, he watched the chief digital officer at the front of the room, slide clicker in hand, apologizing that the digital team was changing the product road map based on what they discovered in early market tests. A few heads in the audience turned, revealing skeptical smirks. Seeing this, Nathan yelled out, “Woo-hoo” and started clapping. Then he declared, “This means your team is on the right track. If you are doing new things, you should expect to change course along the way.” The assembled group smiled at his antics, but that was part of the message he was there to teach: in a world of uncertainty, inevitably some part of what you imagine will need to be changed.
Famed innovation professor Clayton Christensen estimated that 93 percent of startups have to change their strategy. Consider Max Levchin’s long, twisting journey to co-create PayPal. When Levchin dropped in on a cryptology lecture at Stanford University, there were only six people in the room, one of them a hedge fund manager named Peter Thiel. The two agreed to team up, founding a startup called Fieldlink, which created software libraries for the coming wave of application developers who would need to facilitate handheld device access to IT networks. Levchin recalls thinking, “Any minute now, there’ll be millions of people begging for security on their handheld devices. [But] it just wasn’t happening.”1
So they pivoted—in business terms, changing direction based on what you have learned—from creating software libraries to creating the actual software itself. A few people expressed interest, but no customers materialized. So they pivoted again, changing their name to Confinity and offering an electronic wallet. Once again, no customers materialized so they pivoted to sending money between Palm Pilots. This idea at least attracted an investor. But although they managed to attract a few thousand users, growth was slow. Levchin suggested setting up a way to send money to people via their email address, in case they didn’t have a Palm Pilot. Unexpectedly, users started flocking to the email payment part of the business, including users from a “sketchy” new online platform called eBay. Levchin recalls how at first they resisted, but when the number of users for email payments reached over 1.5 million (compared with their 12,000 Palm Pilot users), they pivoted again, changing their name to PayPal.2 Looking back on those days, Reid Hoffmann, PayPal’s first chief operating officer (and who later founded LinkedIn) recalls, “I couldn’t have drawn a road map. We discovered our future as it happened.”3
Pivoting is something almost every company has to do, whether they are easily adaptable software startups or hard-science companies like Fluidigm, which shrunk a chemical testing laboratory down to the size of a chip. On the journey from idea to company success, Fluidigm founder Gajus Worthington had to lead this highly technical, complex company through three major changes: from microfabricated plumbing chips to a microfluidic device for biotech applications, then to a microfluidic chip applicable across many industries, and finally to being a commercial manufacturer. Each change required immense organizational and personal change. Looking back, Worthington observes that “people who are able to adapt have an allegiance to learning, to self-improvement, to the mission of the company.”4
Pivoting isn’t about abandoning course but instead about using what you learned to adjust your course. As entrepreneur Eric Ries, who popularized the term pivot in this context, put it, “pivoting redeems failure” by using what you learned to make adjustments based on what you have learned to be more successful.5 Although PayPal has pursued many ventures, it has always evolved around security and payments. Likewise, Fluidigm tried many ways to miniaturize laboratory procedures. The lesson is that it is normal to have to change course when navigating uncertainty.
Personal Pivots
The most important pivots are the ones that enable personal transformation. In spite of the exhausting or awkward phases they may demand, these pivots result in individuals living the fullest expression of themselves. Christophe Vasseur recalls the transcendent summer evening in Provence, the sun low on the fields of wheat and lavender, when his father’s friend took them to a special restaurant. Down a tiny dusty road, at the end of a stone path in an old barn, Clément Bruno had set a service for twenty people. There were no signs for Chez Bruno and no menu, but the owner welcomed these strangers with “open arms and a singing voice.”6 As the summer afternoon faded into dusk, Bruno brought out one delicious dish after another. “A sublime ravioli with fresh herbs, seasoned with just a touch of olive oil,” followed by “a few crayfish flambéed with cognac and deglazed with champagne … because they’re so light!” Vasseur remembers.
The experience changed him permanently. “Never again did I experience such an encounter. More than a festive dinner, it was a lesson in life. At the time I was sixteen, and [Bruno’s] words, his passion, and his belief opened a path.” Vasseur continued his education, working for ten years in the fashion industry in Asia and Europe until “[I] was tired of the suits and ties that I encountered every day.” He decided it was finally time to explore his curiosity and registered for a course in bread making. “I remember my first contact with bread dough. I felt like I was in communion, in conversation with it.”
Vasseur recognized the desire to change his career, but he wondered how he could support himself during the change. He reached out to a business school in Paris and found an adjunct teaching position that would cover his rent. Then he started taking baking classes. “My professional transition would be long and fraught with difficulties,” Vasseur remembers. It was less glamorous off the fast track, and making ends meet proved difficult. He persevered, following his curiosity about traditional baking techniques, trying out recipes for four years while teaching at the business school before he felt ready to start his own bakery.
“Rollerblades on my feet, I combed the streets of Paris. I stopped at all bakeries that attracted me,” Vasseur recounts. “At the intersection of Rue de Marseille and Rue Yves Toudic, there was not a soul on the horizon; just wholesale leather shops and this bakery on the corner, giving the impression of always having been there.” When he inquired about buying the bakery, he discovered that the baker had gone bankrupt three times in the last seven years, there were five competing bakeries within a one-thousand-foot radius, and the street had almost no foot traffic. “I was indeed the only one to see a future in this bakery,” Vasseur admits. Despite the obstacles, and to his amazement, the bank accepted his offer to buy the bakery out of bankruptcy.
Vasseur renamed the bakery Du Pain et des Idées (Bread and Ideas). He kept the historic glass ceilings and beveled mirrors, then decorated with antique baking tins and generous baskets to hold the bread. Vasseur remembers he had to “work like a madman” to get it off the ground, all while continuing to experiment. One project involved reviving an abandoned “drop firing” technique, where the bread bakes as the oven cools. Vasseur named the loaf le pain des amis (bread of friends). A few weeks later, an older gentleman walked into the bakery. He explained that his wife had picked up some pain des amis, and that “when he opened the bag, he found himself as a seven-year-old in his grandfather’s bakery.” The older man “started to cry upon rediscovering the buried impressions of his childhood, and the memory of a loved one who had suddenly left this world.” Vasseur himself shed tears. “He gave me the confirmation that I was on the right track and that I should persevere.” Although Du Pain et des Idées has gone on to become one of the most famous bakeries in Paris, “more than any other accolade, his message touched me deeply,” Vasseur says.
Looking back, he admits that at sixteen, he wasn’t ready. “I had not clearly formulated the dream of becoming a baker,” and he hadn’t developed the strong convictions necessary to “make this professional universe my own and turn it into an art.” But when the time did come, Vasseur was willing to pivot and so effected a massive change through a series of small, incremental steps. Looking back on his journey, Vasseur reminds us, “It is normal to fail, to not do it right the first time, just like a child learning to walk. If it doesn’t work, it won’t kill us; but we can perish from not having tried.” For those who are on the fence, he counsels, “It’s never too late to go toward one’s passion, to embrace it, to throw oneself headlong into it. Never too late to be ruled by your heart, to listen to what your nature is telling you. Never too late to change your way of consuming and working.”
Today Vasseur runs both the bakery and a baking school in the south. Moreover, three decades after that magical dinner in Provence, Vasseur received a letter from Clément Bruno, inviting him back to Chez Bruno. The now-Michelin-starred chef had seen Vasseur on a cooking show, and after a joyful reunion in the south of France, Chez Bruno became a client, serving pain des amis at the very restaurant that had originally sparked Vasseur’s passion so many years ago.
Reflection and Practice
Pivoting is an essential part of navigating uncertainty. There is rarely one clear path that stretches forward without a bend or fog or obstacle. And even when a path or obstacle may feel certain, it can change, sometimes quickly. Krista Tippett, who was living in West Berlin as a New York Times journalist in the late 1980s, recounts visiting a friend in East Germany who had just finished reading Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale.7 “To imagine that a hundred years from now,” she said—risking censure if the microphones in that apartment captured her glee—“the GDR will just be a thing of the past, like that!” Tippett recalls feeling pity for her friend. “Such was the sense of totality and finality in that historical moment that I could not imagine the beyond of it, even in a century.” But then only three years later, the Berlin Wall fell after a “bumbling bureaucrat” mistakenly announced that East Germans would be allowed to apply for a passport. “What people heard was possibility. And what followed, as en masse the population of the entire city stepped out of their apartments and began to walk towards the checkpoints of the Wall, was the final unraveling of fear. The Wall had never had a chance against this mass of humanity.”
Tippett’s experience reminds us that big changes are possible, even when they seem impossible. Pivots are a tool to help that change along, whether they be small course corrections or a 180-degree about-face. Pivots build on what we learned from the past, redeeming what the overly critical might call a failure, by reseeing it as a valuable lesson for taking the next step. Pivots also help make changes feel safer because they aren’t wild leaps into an abyss. Like in basketball, where a player must keep one foot planted to make a fair pass of the ball, a pivot is a shift rooted in a place that you are moving away from but still grounded in. Recall that Vasseur didn’t just quit his job one day and start a bakery the next. Instead, he took classes while continuing to work in fashion, then took a teaching position at a local business school while taking baking classes full time, and finally made the step to become a baker.
Here are a few ways to think about pivots in your life.
- Although it might feel that change is not possible, for a moment consider whether there are situations at work or in your personal life that might work better if you tweaked them. Are certain problems or longings showing up repetitively and begging you to pivot? How could you try an experiment as the first step toward a simple pivot?
- Are you doing things against your conscience to belong to or continue a tradition that you know needs to change? Could a pivot with this tradition (taking a break, exploring other ideas, talking to people involved) give you more courage to act with integrity?
- Could pivoting be about eliminating something that’s no longer necessary in your life? In a study where young children and chimps had to perform a series of steps to get candy, chimps learned to skip the unnecessary steps, whereas children kept them because they had been taught to follow instructions. Where do you need to pivot from the instructions for life that you inherited?
- It might help to recall a time in the past when you pivoted or someone you admire who did. What did you learn from that experience? Or perhaps you could share your experience with someone else who wants to make a change.