How Does The Fitness Industry Change Its Mindset ?

The facts are that while the fitness and wellness industry has grown over the past quarter century, obesity and health quality in the developed world have not improved.  Many argue they've gotten worse. The fitness industry still serves about 15% of the adult population while failing to broaden its appeal to the not yet fit. Something is broken because things have not improved and I fear the industry is failing to reach its promise and as a result, things need to change - but how ?

Innovation; as Vijay Govindarajan, Professor at the Tucks School of Business at Dartmouth and co-author of 10 Rules for Strategic Innovators , is about 2 major things. First, leaders must accept things ARE changing and figure out how to adapt accordingly. Second, leaders must understand change is NOT a technical problem its a MINDSET problem. Therefore to enable a business or even an industry to adapt one must introduce NEW mindsets.

In the fitness industry this means having the courage to bring in fresh voices from outside the industry. It also requires new performance measures, the embracement of collaboration, and developing a culture that tolerates or even rewards failure.

What do you think ? Contact me Bryan O'Rourke and share your views. How can the fitness industry change its mindset ? Is there a reluctance to bring in new voices ? Do you think the fitness and wellness industry should change its thinking if it is going to truly have a real impact on the quality of more people's lives ? Do you believe intiatives like the Weekly Fitness Challenge reflect new ways of doing things that can make a difference ? Let me hear your views !

Message To The Fitness Industry - Real Innovation Requires Changing Your Thinking

One of my favorite quotes is that of Daniel Boorstin who observed, "The greatest obstacle to discovery is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge." Boorstin, a renowned historian and former Librarian of Congress who wrote numerous books including, The Genius of American Politics, Democracy and Its Discontents, and The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson, was right. Overcoming challenges is largely a function of letting go of assumptions. As he put it, "If we think we know something, then we face an obstacle to innovation." In his 1983 bestseller The Discoverers , the author chronicled the achievements of Galileo, Columbus, Darwin, Gutenberg and Freud, among others, who emerged as drivers of creativity and courage, and committed ingenious acts of revolt against ingrained habit. Great discoverers dispel illusions and reveal something new about the world as is further evidenced by Boorstin's interpretation of Thomas Jefferson's contributions and philosophies, when he said,

"Jefferson, in my opinion, was the apostle of experience. In other words, he was the person who believed that everything had to change. He thought that every generation should have the opportunity to have its own revolution, to write its own laws, and that was his vision of the past and the future"

Given the crisis of obesity "Globesity as Phillip and Jackie Mills call it" should we not evaluate how the growing fitness industry has not really impacted the problem ? Reliance upon Boorstin's realizations and the lessons of history are more relevant than ever, as is the need for leaders to emerge, dispel illusion and move us forward via our own revolution in the fitness and wellness industry. Obviously what we have been doing has not been working.

Could institutional thinking in fitness and wellness be the very "illusion of knowledge" Boorstin identified? Classic institutions are by nature closed, selective and controlling. Persons participating in institutional thinking have to be "careful" of what they absorb, guarded with whom they interact and controlling of everything. Essentially, risk aversion and maintenance of the status quo is the dna of most institutions and thus the reasons most institutions are failing in an increasingly network oriented world. Are our institutions then at the heart of the problem ?

No matter the debate; be it health care, education, or your organization's effectiveness, adopting network strategies and dispelling institutional dogma is at the core of true innovation. Watch the video by Thomas Power who describes institutional thinking, its limits and the opportunity that the new paradigm provides.

What do you think ? Does the fitness and wellness industry need to change its mindset in order to become more effective at impacting the health crisis we face today ? Please contact me Bryan O'Rourke, and share your views.

Innovation - It's Up To Us To Remove The Barriers To Progress

C.K. Prahalad, author of The New Age of Innovation, Driving Co-Created Value Through Global Networks, among other books, makes a very important observation in a recent interview. He says, " the competitive landscape is morphing...creating a new way of thinking. Current innovation literature is based largely on the legacy of the industrial age." In other words many leaders have not seen the opportunity of new innovation because they continue to define opportunity via vanished industrial paradigms. C.K. is right. In my experience most leadership creates the barriers to progress because they are too rooted in the past and therefore leaders can't see or understand the foundations of the future. The good news is that CK and his book addresses this and other issues to lay a foundation for how organization can change to focus on new solutions that indeed create value aligned with the modality of the new world.

His "one consumer at a time" by delivering personalized experience or  as he terms it "N=1"; and his "R=G" concept, wherein an orchestration of resources from a wide variety of people and organizations are used to deliver value, are key concepts to adopt for creating value in our new world.

CK notes two shifts necessary to grasp the innovation oportunity. The first is the way we look at the world. Leadership must accept it is going to change. You have to have a point of view about the future when evaluating the present. You cannot anchor yourself in the past. The second needed shift is  that leaders must come to terms with the dominant logic they have relied upon in order to rid themselves of past logic to embrace the new.

Watch CK's Businessweek interviews below. These are insightful and helpful in understanding more about how businesses can adopt N=1 and R=G concepts to progress rapidly and effectively through innovation.