“Come look at this jif,” my father called me one morning while bursting out with laughter. I wondered to myself what new revolution he had discovered this week. I come to him, and he shows me the popular Michael Scott’s 2-second looped video where he’s screaming “NO”. The first thing I asked after coming across the animation was how he pronounced it. “It’s not jif it’s gif.” I said. “How do you know for sure? I am pretty sure it’s jif.”. While we argued for some time, we failed to grasp how something as minute as a gif(or a jif) was so relevant in today’s world. Relevant to such an extent that it was heavy enough to become the first conversation between a father and son on a Friday morning.”
Ask leaders how they will respond to a crisis or a massive new opportunity, and they often will tell you they already know what to do. This is surprising because most crises and opportunities have unexpected elements. A high-powered executive whom we coach once told us, “In any crisis, I come out of the gate fast and take action. I go over, under, or through any wall in my way. With my people, I lead from the front.” To be sure, that approach has the benefit of decisiveness, but it offers a narrow path, especially in high-stakes situations. What happens when such leaders run into obstacles they can’t muscle their way through?Ask leaders how they will respond to a crisis or a massive new opportunity, and they often will tell you they already know what to do. This is surprising because most crises and opportunities have unexpected elements. A high-powered executive whom we coach once told us, “In any crisis, I come out of the gate fast and take action. I go over, under, or through any wall in my way. With my people, I lead from the front.” To be sure, that approach has the benefit of decisiveness, but it offers a narrow path, especially in high-stakes situations. What happens when such leaders run into obstacles they can’t muscle their way through?
Another leader we coached had a different approach. He was an incredible delegator with legendary calm. This worked well until a crisis surfaced and his team started feeling lost and overwhelmed. He stayed steady, confident in his default style, telling people, “Don’t worry, I have confidence that you’ll figure it out.” They didn’t figure it out, team members began fighting with one another, and within months the company lost its market-leading position.
In our work coaching and advising senior leaders, we have found that when faced with unfamiliar or risky situations, leaders often rely on their familiar playbook. They act instinctively, falling back on behavior and postures that worked for them before. But should their operating environment experience a discontinuity, reflexes—which may still be right at times—can no longer be counted on. To be effective, leaders need to rise above their default reactions and generate more options for how to act in the very moments when they are needed most.
Few leadership roles come with a treasure map showing a direct line to where X marks the spot. That’s why the ability to generate multiple pathways to a desired destination is crucial to success. Whether it’s chasing a strategy that could drive 10x growth in a business, facing a potentially catastrophic threat, or guiding a team through uncharted territory, great leaders generate options so that when an opportunity arises or a crisis hits, they can pivot in real time and make the optimal move.
Our experience shows that leaders’ success depends on their ability to MOVE—that is, to be mindfully alert to priorities, to generate options so that they always have several ways to win, to validate their own vantage point, and to engage with stakeholders to ensure that they are along for the ride. (We lay out this framework in our book, Real-Time Leadership. To gauge your ability to MOVE, take our self-assessment at RealTimeLeadershipInstitute.com.) In this article, we examine the crucial second step of our model. Specifically, we look at four common leadership approaches and the scenarios in which each can be most helpful, and we introduce a process for navigating the options in real time.
Ask around, and most people nowadays know what gifs are. Even if they don’t, there’s a high chance they use it regularly. Anyone, in general, would say that they found gifs when pressing the letter W thrice became a norm for them. An unbelievable fact to many, gifs originated in the late 1980s.
With time, many extravagant internet-tech got obsolete. Popular techs like flash animation or my space became extinct because of the ever-changing and demanding nature of the internet. The one that stayed, though, was GIFs. CompuServe developers found a solution in GIFs when looking for animated compressing images that could be transferred with very low data loss. The team in CompuServe, led by an American scientist named Steve Wilhite, introduced a bit size image format and coined it as Graphics interchanged format or GIF in short.
Slowly after its emergence in the late 90s and early 2000s, a market grew around GIFs. Initially, GIFs were used vigorously to make websites look more catchy. They were design tools, and their sole purpose at that time was to enhance anything on the website. However, it burst out within the scene of the web when the internet started becoming the next big thing in the 1900s. Sensing the potential of their creation, in 1994, CompuServe and Unisys(the company responsible for licensing GIFs and its technology) filed a patent and put a hefty fee for anyone looking to use the GIFs. Suddenly, it hit the designers and developers that this was against the ethics of the internet. So they did what everyone who hates sudden amendments made by an upper authority does; they stopped using them.
In 2004, the patent ran out. The floodgates were open, and designers hustled on the scene of GIFs yet again. But with the internet changing and entering a new age, it failed to gain the traction it once had. That was soon to change. Fast forward to 2007, Tumblr came, and it quickly became popular for its ability to allow users to post multiple contents simultaneously. GIFs returned, and Tumblr became a platform for designers to showcase their talents, collab and make money. With the rejuvenation done, GIFs slowly crept back into the scene and since then didn’t have to look back. It became even more popular after Facebook introduced stickers in 2015, and Instagram followed suit in 2018.
Presently, GIFs are expressions shared between individuals on social media. Most people use them as memes ( the equivalent of jokes shared via photos ). However, GIFs aren’t just restricted to people for personal use. They have a big influence when it comes to branding and marketing. Large corporations use GIFs to showcase their product to the world in today’s social media and digital marketing age. The current media that grabs the most attention presently is social media. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and other platforms are what people use to know what’s happening in the world. GIFs are an easy way for marketers to grab customers’ attention and let them know what companies are selling within a very short time. They invoke certain emotional responses in customers and let them associate themselves with different brands. For example: if a certain gif you come across has your attention span, you are more likely to know about that brand and its products. It may also evoke particular feelings that connect them with the brand. Considering the current generation of people and their medium of expression, GIFs are an excellent gateway for brands to visualise their products to customers.
Currently, a company named GIPHY has the largest database of mainstream and state-of-the-art GIFs. It was founded in 2013 when Alex Chung and Jace Cooke decided to compile all the GIFs in the world in one place. What initially started as a search engine for GIFs turned into a database where people can use and upload animations of their own. It has more than 700 million users who access thousands of GIFs constantly. While having no revenue model, it generates cash flow through advertisement and sponsorship deals. GIPHY did manage to raise tens of millions of dollars in venture backing. In May 2020, Meta Inc bought GIPHY for a reported 400 million Dollars, but the merger is still under review for possible antitrust violations. GIPHY’s gifs are embedded with a clever section of coding which lets its developers know users’ browsing activity, something they integrated into third-party applications. Experts claim that Meta’s prime motive for acquiring GIPHY was better access to people’s browsing activities.
Unfortunately, GIPHY is not the only lion in the jungle. Tenor, a different company that does the same, is in the market, constantly knocking on the door to be the best. Google acquired the GIF platform Tenor in March 2018 and integrated the technology into google images and Google board, the virtual keyboard of Google. To be the best in the market, you have to be within the first few searches in a search engine. When people go on google and search GIFs, if your company doesn’t come first, you’re losing. This is exactly what’s happening. The aftermath of the purchase of tenor made it the first thing google shows when people search for GIFs. Even if GIPHY has the largest database, it’s losing traction. As a result, Meta is taking fatal blows as well.
Regardless of how the industry turned out, GIFs are a vital part of our lives. What started as a design tool transformed into a completely different breed of content. The people at CompuServe never thought things would expand to the point where companies are fighting for its ownership with a huge chunk of cash on the line. With designers always making new strides in the GIF industry and more people looking to invest in it, the future is limitless.
