I was terrible at netball, I could never pivot. If you can, its a power move

What can you learn from companies and people that pivot?

“And pivot girls, come on Lane Fox, pivot and shoot”. I can still hear the words of my sports teacher Miss Derrick ringing in my ears. I, as always, was unsuccessfully navigating a game of netball. This memory came bouncing back to me last week because of two politicians. Firstly, came the very sad death of Glenda Jackson  who was someone who monumentally dominated the stage and screen and then pivoted to become an MP. Secondly, I  interviewed the outgoing Finnish PM Sanna Marin at an event. As a politician, that strange category of employee, she is having to do a  pivot out of necessity as the popular tide has turned. They got me thinking about the concept.

There are of course, many famous business pivots. Slack started out as a gaming company called Tiny Speck, but when its game didn't take off, the company pivoted to focus on team communication. This manoeuvre was a huge success, and Slack is now one of the most popular team communication tools in the world, owned by Salesforce. 

Did you know that YouTube started out as a dating site called Tune In Hook Up? Unsurprisingly, it struggled to gain traction. The company wisely switched to focus on video sharing, and YouTube is now the most popular video sharing site in the world. Or how about the story of  Nespresso who pivoted from selling coffee machines to offering a subscription-based coffee delivery service. Managing to change from a complex hardware model to a lucrative subscription model was clever.

 All these businesses pivoted during their early years. It ensured their survival. All of them matched data with quick decision making when product - market fit was hard to find. Crucially, they didn't become overly wedded to their original idea.

Bigger companies have also made permanent pivots in response to a change in their market. Nokia is always an amazing story to me. Hard to believe it started as a paper mill in 1865. By the 1980s it had changed mobile communications and Finland forever. One thing stands out to me in their story. A commitment to massive investment in research and development that gave them an advantage in understanding the new sectors in which they could innovate.

More recently, Microsoft’s move from selling software to offering cloud-based services was a big pivot that has paid off in spades. Perhaps the most important factor here was Satya Nadella’s visionary leadership which turbocharged lacklustre growth. 

So, at a corporate level, with bold leadership and good data, pivots can pay off - but what about an individual career pivot?

More and more of us have decided that careers are not straight lines as perhaps they were fifty years ago. Rather than progress in one type of work or company, people are zigzagging across multiple sectors or sometimes throwing it all up in the air and plunging into something completely different.  The pandemic definitely accelerated this trend. Your boss or board may not like me for this, but I love the stories of dramatic career shifts. In a world where we are all working longer and where more people want to move into work with purpose not just profit, it could be a great decision. 

One of my favourite examples is Johnny Ohlson who I met recently. He started in advertising and went on to become a director of Soho House. Nothing too remarkable there, you might say but then he leapt into a totally unrelated industry - biotech. Johnny founded Touchlight, which now has over 150 employees and is one of the world's leading synthetic DNA businesses. That, surely, gets an award for boldness on the scale of Satya.  

As he explained to me, he has always managed creative processes, albeit different ones. It was somewhat of a bugbear of his that science isn’t regarded as a creative sector. Yet it is a sector that takes a thought, develops it into intellectual property and then builds a commercial model around it.

There are pivots closer to my home too. Please forgive me for shameless favouritism but my partner, Chris Gorell Barnes, went from running his own digital marketing agency to pivoting his entire life into ocean conservation and impact investing. Watching him learn a new industry is inspiring. I know that his single minded determination comes from a deep anxiety about environmental issues but also total clarity that the marine world is where he wants to be. I have never seen him work so hard and be so happy at the same time. 

What I take from both these stories is that to increase the likelihood of a successful pivot, you have to be prepared to swap the seniority of where your career is at for the ambiguity and uncertainty of a startup. Only that startup is you. It takes phenomenal effort but the rewards and fulfillment can be incredible.

As for me, I wonder if I have finally made Miss Derrick proud. I have done my own mini pivots from the digital world to the real one via everything in between. I am pretty sure she is probably still waiting for me to score a goal.