Breaking the Shackles of a Business’ Past

Red figure standing between two circles with the words past and future

The past is never dead.  It’s not even past. – by William Faulkner

A vexing challenge in attaining a business breakthrough of any type – sales, profitability, business model, company culture – is the inexorable “backward” pull of a business’ historical results and accomplishments (or lack thereof).

For sure, as effective executives, we know to focus on opportunities not problems and that past performance, good or bad, is neither indicative nor predictive of future results, yet…

…whether we like it or not we are reminded always of what has gone before, with the “unsaid” being that no matter how hard we try, the future of our business will be more or less like its past, with the best we can realistically hope for is just a few percentage points of growth here and there.

This frustrating reality is caused, to a very large degree, by the day-to-day operational “inertia” of most businesses, big and small.

It is the inertia that develops when the same people interact with each other in the same way – managing meetings, running projects, and assigning to-dos in that default and “comfortable” way.

Over time, individual executives start bringing to these repetitive business interactions increasingly hardened perspectives.

And then this inertia turns to a creeping lethargy that stops a business in its tracks, especially when opportunities that require proactive action to pursue present themselves.

Now I hope that just by describing the problem sheds light on how to solve it: Consciously and constantly injecting into a business new, different, and extraordinary stimuli.

The stimuli of Organizational Change – bringing new people in and encouraging under performers to depart.

The stimuli of Branding Change – ditching the old logo, tagline and website and starting over new and fresh.

The stimuli of Financial Change – seeking and securing investment capital to grow faster and more strategically.

Heck, just contemplating new stimuli like these can be a breath of badly needed fresh air – forcing executives to visualize and imagine what their desired business of the future should and can be…

…and then working back to the present time to define what needs to be done to get it there.

Yes, when it comes to breaking the shackles of the past, the default strategic stance should be that new and different is always better until and unless proven otherwise

I wouldn’t worry too much about whether this approach will lead to poorly considered risk-taking.

Because whether we like it or not, our businesses’ pasts are always with us.

But by taking conscious, definitive, and different action – repeatedly and determinedly – we can easily break free of it.

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