Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future
Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Ziebelman
PublicAffairs (July 2024)

“We have met the enemy and he is us.”  Pogo the Possum

Mike Maples and Peter Ziebelman agree. They created this book in order to convince as many people as possible that, “in different ways, all of us unwittingly let our own self-imposed limits govern how we think and act throughout our lives. The trickiest part is that they can become so embedded in our assumptions we fail to even realize they exist, not to mention how they hold us back.” False assumptions are like chains that, in Warren Buffett’s words, “are too light to notice until they are too heavy  to break.”

In the Introduction, Maples differentiates “pattern making/matching” from “pattern breaking.”  Just to be clear,  “I’m not saying that pattern matching is inherently ‘bad’ or breaking patterns is always ‘good.’ They are distinct mindsets, each with benefits and limitations.” Indeed, “pattern matching is a crucial cognitive skill. It helps us process information efficiently, make decisions, learn, avoid danger, and adapt. It’s vital for everyday functioning.”

That said, to achieve a high-impact breakthrough, “you’ll need a different mindset.”  Maples cites this passage from George Bernard Shaw’s play, Man and Superman: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

I am again reminded of this observation by Charles Kettering: “If you’ve always done it this way, it’s probably wrong.”

Organizations can be pattern breakers in their competitive marketplace if– and only if– their leaders adopt and nurture a pattern-breaking mindset, one “that breaks free from conventional thinking and actions.” In Leading Change, James O’Toole suggests that the strongest resistance to change tends to be cultural in nature, the result of what he so aptly characterizes as “the ideology of comfort and the tyranny of custom.”

Maples and Ziebelman may have written this book primarily for leaders in start-up companies but most of the material (with only slight modification) can also be of substantial value to leaders in mature organizations, especially those Marshall Goldsmith has in mind when asserting that “what got you here won’t get you there.”

In fact, I’d take it a step further and assert that what got you here won’t even allow you to remain here, wherever and however you define “here” and “there.”

Congratulations to Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Ziebelman on Pattern Breakers. It is a brilliant achievement. Bravo!