|
 Nancy Wu
Sometimes, opportunity knocks on our doors. But we can’t always count on it. Most of the time, we gotta go out and grab it by the neck, drag it through the door and tie it down on the chair. It’s kind of like the story of how I proposed to my husband. But that is a topic for another day.
Opportunity means change. And most of us are afraid of change. But sometimes the status quo is even scarier. While some folks insist on remaining as-is (“If it ain’t broke…”), others are innovating, evolving and surpassing. Your competition is counting on your love of the familiar and the same, while they adopt new technology, experiment with new processes and quietly inch ahead.
This invisible race remains unseen, until one day, you finally feel a big pain. Compared to others, it becomes obvious that the game has changed, and you’re way behind. Then the scrambling begins: big re-engineering projects, big disruption, big upgrades and big implementations. The consultants rush in, the multi-page project plans get erected, and the pressure to produce all kinds of spectacular results becomes unbearably high.
Consider the alternative -- empowering your team to suggest and act on small new ideas continually. The beauty of small ideas is that they are easy and fast to implement, and the stakes are low if they don’t end up working out. A bunch of small new ideas, when smoothly incorporated over time, turns into one large competitive advantage that becomes hard for the competition to duplicate.
|