“Success Is Dangerous"
Photo by Jingming Pan on Unsplash
“Success is dangerous. One begins to copy oneself and to copy oneself is more dangerous than to copy others.” Pablo Picasso
When we hit upon a winning formula, it’s tempting to think we’ve got it all figured out. Because we actually do. We’ve understood what the market wants, what customers are seeking, at least at that specific point in time.
So we keep executing that winning formula over and over, and so long as the results are positive, our view tends to be if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
But at some point, there’s a pendulum swing. The underlying market shifts. New technologies are created. Hungrier, more aggressive competitors emerge. Or tastes simply change.
These swings or shifts can be subtle, or, more starkly in your face. They can emerge over a period of years (globalization) or they can come through in what feels like one fell swoop (the emergence of the internet).
Throughout, there are signs that it’s having an impact on what we do, but so long as we’re seeing ‘results’, we believe we’re immune. Even if the accompanying metrics show signs of wear and tear: Growth, but at declining rates. Wins at some accounts, accompanied by losses at other key ones. Brand name recognition, but shifting perceptions of relevance.
The thing is, success is a drug, and one of its worst side effects, if we’re not careful, is a sense of complacency. A sense that the good times will continue and that our relevance will remain unchallenged. So we copy ourselves, until it’s too late, at which point, shifting the pendulum back becomes a monumental effort (if it’s even at all possible).
I think a better approach may be to treat success with skepticism, perhaps even a level of contempt. We need to remain cautious of its enticements. And we need to be active in how we react to it. Certainly, we should look to understand how we got there and institutionalize those learnings. That only makes sense. But we need to keep an eye on the future, which means:
Listen to customers, big and small. What are they saying, how are they reacting, why are they buying, and why are they not?
Listen to your people. What are they hearing? What are they seeing on the ground? How are they seeing your delivery mechanisms changing?
Understand how you can be replaced. Identify emerging technologies, processes and practices that can take away the foundations of how you do what you do. Look for those trend lines that reduce or eliminate the need for what you do, no matter how far fetched it may seem today.
Disrupt yourself. Test and learn. Try new ideas. Adopt new approaches. Pilot new pathways, even small ones. If there is a risk that a part of what you do can be replaced, automated or otherwise made more efficient, make a point to do it yourself - and ideally replace it with something more valuable, more sticky, more enduring.
That’s not meant to be an exhaustive list, it’s just a start. It’s underpinned by Andy Grove’s philosophy that only the paranoid survive. Harsh, but true.
The point is to not accept the status quo, rather it must be to move, to act, to change.
The alternative is complacency, which ultimately, leads to irrelevance.
