The Need For Reinvention

It takes weeks and months and years running a business to find what you do well and focus your efforts on perfecting it or at least doing the best version possible. It takes some time flailing about, trying different approaches, and sometimes many things before you hit on the sweet spot where your ingenuity and ideas and ability meet an opportunity to create greatness. And that’s if you’re lucky enough to get that far; so many toil and never achieve any sort of breakthrough, their efforts ultimately for naught. 

But for those who do land on a great idea at the right moment, well, there’s joy in the serendipitous good fortune that you’ve happened upon, and a desire to take full advantage of it. Every entrepreneur recognizes how challenging the startup world is and the odds stacked against t founders. Success isn’t an inevitability, and reaching your goals deserves the celebration and relief that comes with it.

Were that success was a permanent state. There are few businesses large enough to be insulated against the vagaries of the consumer or commercial market, and yesterday’s success stories can become tomorrow’s cautionary tales without the necessary foresight to forestall a downturn. If achieving success is like climbing a mountain, it’s a mountain that’s always shifting and changing, with the peak never in the same location. 

Sustained success requires us to reinvent ourselves, to avoid the complacency that could easily set in once we’ve had a taste of accomplishment. It’s following up on our big idea and improving upon it, if not coming up with a new idea entirely. It’s a safe bet that the best, most successful companies are those that have managed to do that time and time again. I certainly can’t be the only one who has sat down to watch a show on Amazon Prime and thought back to the day when it was just a website where you could buy books; just one of countless examples. 

The idea of reinventing yourself is one that many people bristle at, particularly if they’ve reached a certain age. Part of that is a function of our increasing rigidity as we get older; we’re all destined to become the cranky old folks we derided, as a bit of karmic justice. Another part is an unwillingness to mess with what’s working, which certainly makes sense; the saying “killing the golden goose” has negative connotations for a reason. 

The world won’t sit still, however, as much as we may want it to, and the desires of customers and clients shift with the changing times around them. Customers are loyal to a good product for only so long as it remains good, and a product miles behind its competitors is anything but. So how can we change to stay up with the times without betraying the ideas we started with? How do we navigate a difficult second act into a new version of ourselves and our companies? 

We start by changing before a change is demanded from us. We’ve all seen companies that have had to play catch-up because they were caught on their heels by innovation, and with any luck we’ve internalized the lessons to be drawn from those cases. But there’s a difference between knowing what we have to do and doing it. It’s easy to pay lip service to innovation, but are we following through on it in a real, tangible way, one that will lead to the implementation of new ideas? Perhaps too many of us are comfortable with iteration instead, slow and steady changes introduced over time. And while there’s nothing wrong with that, the normally prudent path of slow and steady occasionally needs a huge push forward to keep up with the pack,

So be brave with your thinking, perhaps more than you occasionally think prudent. The realities of bringing those ideas to life often require us to temper and modulate our expectations anyway, so why not aim for something bolder than we might have otherwise attempted? More than anything, we have to have the courage to be willing to change on a personal level, both in what we do and our business approach. As much faith as we have in our ideas, we need to have in ourselves and our abilities to lead our business into the future, no matter where it’s headed.#onwards.