Are you building
for change?
Change is my job description as a business leader. I talk about it all the time. In order to stay on top I and my business have to constantly change. Nothing in life stays the same. If it is healthy it is progressing and moving forward. If it is not healthy it is regressing and moving backwards. Never the less, nothing stays the same. Any attempt to stay the same while everything else is moving forward is actually moving backwards.
I recently saw a movie about the early life of Richard Feynman, physicist and Nobel prize winner. In this movie there was a great scene with Richard Feynman at about age 5 and his father. Richard was pulling a wagon that had a little red ball in it. He asked his father why the ball moved backwards when he started to pull the wagon. His father took a few minutes to help him see that the ball didn’t actually move, till it hit the back of the wagon. It stayed in the same place but because the wagon moved it looked like the ball was moving backwards.
When everything around us is changing at a rapid rate the systems we build to stay the same can relegate us to moving backwards. I found myself in this situation this week. It’s time for me to reinvest in some software to help some processes in my business run more efficiently. As I was exploring the options, I caught myself being stuck between a decision that will serve my company for the next several years and something that could serve my organization for decades. On the surface, it seemed like a no brainer. Go with the option that will set me up for the most long-term success. The questions that kept me from pulling the trigger were, what didn’t I know? How long term is long term? How do I even know what technology or industry will look like in ten years? I know that things in our world are changing so quickly that I need to be able to stay flexible enough to change with it, or better yet lead the change. But I found myself wanting to create a system that I would only need to learn once. Something that I could install and forget about.
I’m so willing to change and grow in areas of my strengths, but areas of my weaknesses I’d rather install a system that fixes the problem today and forget about it moving forward. Crazily enough I decided to go with the system that will handle everything I need for the foreseeable future, knowing I’ll need to reinvest. As leaders we have all paid a price to get where we are now. But we never arrive. Everything around us keeps moving so if we stop reinvesting and changing we will be obsolete.
Where are you building systems for staying the same vs. systems for growth and change?
