No matter your organization’s age, I bet there is a memory of its past on display — as a piece of nostalgia in case there’s a desire to relive a moment when times were simpler.
Maybe it’s your first dollar, or the first “write-up” in the newspaper — and that’s a good thing. A little reminder of how things used to be may make you appreciate how far you have come. It’s important to remember where you have been, and it’s a view into simpler times.
I think nostalgia does have a place in the business world. So do the Lake Shore Live Steamers, the subject of this month’s Uniquely Cleveland. Some of the 1/8th scale locomotives actually burn coal and emit cinders just like the real things did back in the 19th and 20th centuries when rail transportation was king.
It’s a valuable thing for a company to look back on its history to review a timeline of the milestones it has passed. Then, executives can ask themselves: How did we reach that milestone?
Perhaps an increase — or decrease — in sales occurred at several points on your timeline. Were new products released? Did a competitor encroach on your market share? How did your company deal with these incidents? Did it stay true to its core values?
Hopefully, your analysis doesn’t lead to an excess of the status quo, finding your employees in their comfort zones saying, “We’ve always done it that way and it works.”
I once asked a CEO how to break out of a habit of thinking like that.
“You need to understand the business cycle,” he says. “The main thing is that there are going to be good times and bad times in any business. No business races to the sky and doesn’t have some bumps along the way.
“What you don’t want to do when things are going well is to expect that there is no way for the business to retract. You want to be aware that it doesn’t always go straight up to the sky.”
So in those times, any business may be tempted to expand and do things that are riskier because you may have been emboldened by your past success or you may feel like you really have nothing that can stop you.
“But you have to be careful because hubris that can occur and lead to problems down the road,” he says. “Overexpansion, too much hiring, too much equipment brought on, new technologies and new acquisitions — all those kinds of things when businesses are doing very well may not get a careful scrutiny than if the business was going through a bad economic cycle. You want to make sure that you are doing those things with the full support of your customers, that you know exactly where the business is going from one month to the next, one quarter to the next, one year to the next, before you make those decisions.”
So look backward as much as you want, but be careful about getting away from your core. Remember what it was that really made you successful.
Dennis Seeds is editor-in-chief of Smart Business Magazine.
