Success In Business: Is It Time To Take A Different Approach?

Business Success Sometimes Requires A Different Approach

It doesn’t matter whether we are referring to success in business or success in life, everybody knows that success requires perseverance, patience and persistence. If you want to win the game, first of all you have to show up in the game. Not just sit and cheer from the sidelines, but actively throw yourself ‘boots and all’ into the scrum. Success is definitely not a spectator sport. But what if you are turning up week in week out to your business, persistently and consistently taking action and yet the success scoreboard still reads ’0′?

There is a wonderful story about the Progressive Caterpillar. Basically scientists discovered (don’t ask me how) that if you put a procession of caterpillars on a table, they will all begin to follow one another and march in procession round and round in a circle. Even when the caterpillars are starving and you put their favourite food into the centre of the circle, the caterpillars will not break their circular procession to go and get the food. The moral of the story? Just because you are taking action, does not mean you are necessarily making any progress. Showing up with persistence and consistence is most certainly key to your success in business, and if you have ever read any of my other articles or blog posts you will know how highly I rank persistence on the Richter scale of success. But what about the other side of the coin? What about the voice that chants, “If you keep on doing what you’ve always done, you will keep on getting what you’ve always got”. How many times have you heard that? Originally attributed to  Aristotle, this time-worn phrase has been endlessly repackaged and handed down through the centuries, yet the words continue to speak the same truth today as they did then and as such will no doubt be around in millennia to come. A little later Einstein threw his hat into the ring by declaring: “The definition of insanity is to keep on doing the same thing and expect different results” – like bashing your head against the proverbial brick wall yet expecting that next time it will not hurt.

So where is the middle ground in all of this?  How do you know when it is time to break the scrum and take a different approach?

A highly successful friend of mine once shared this: If things in your business are not currently working out, you don’t necessarily have to do something different,  just do what you are doing differently.

More often than not it is not that you are doing anything majorly wrong (the caterpillars were taking all the right action, just not in the right direction), it is just that you have lost sight of why you are doing it or maybe that the goal posts moved but you just didn’t notice so now all your shots are way off target  and you just need to stop and realign.

For example, maybe your advertising isn’t working. There may be nothing wrong at all with your message, you may just be broadcasting it via the wrong forum. Or maybe your target audience has changed slightly and so you need to adjust your message to ‘speak’ to your new audience.

As always, it goes a level deeper than this. It may not necessarily be what you are doing physically that needs adjusting. It maybe the mindset behind what you are doing that is currently holding you to a certain pattern in the way that you do things. What we ‘know’ as reality is based on our current belief systems and this ‘knowledge’ can either propel us forward in a certain direction or keep us from taking certain actions based on what we perceive the results  of those outcomes to be. The story of Maria Elena Ibanez illustrates this perfectly.  Back in the early ’90′s nobody was selling computers to Africa. The potential market was considered too small for the big companies to bother with, so one Latin American lady saw it as her opportunity. The marketing experts told her that Africa was too poor for computer products, especially if they were sold by a non African female in a male-dominated culture. Maria Elena Ibanez did not ‘see’ it that way. She saw that Africa needed computers. Armed with only a catalogue of products and the Yellow pages, she flew to Nairobi. Two weeks later she flew home with $150,000 in orders. Two years later sales stood at over $5 million and her company International High Tech Marketing averaged $13 million per year in sales throughout the 1990′s.

There are two lessons in this story. Firstly, what Maria Elena held as her beliefs system enabled her to do things that other much larger, more ‘successful’ companies would not even have considered. Secondly, and more importantly, she approached things differently. Instead of trying to launch a huge advertising campaign she decided simply to pick up the Yellow pages and call all the businesses in it. A simple enough action, anybody could have done it. But most people would never have dreamt of taking that action because they would never have ‘believed’ that it could work.

So maybe it is time not to stop ‘doing what you have always done’ but to start doing what you have always done ‘differently‘.

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