"We must change old habits and acquire new ones. The more successful an organization has been, the more difficult and painful this process is apt to be."
We've talked before about the challenges success can bring us. It's truly an amazing study to see what seems counterintuitive to our senses be such a potential hindrance.
To understand the perils of success, we have to understand what success represents. Success is something that has come from the past and has a power of its own today based upon that former impetus and push it gives us from its beginning. Think of success as something founded in the past, and you'll start to understand its dangers.
Another reason it's sometimes hard to understand why success is dangerous, is because it seems the only alternative is failure, which is a mistake to think. Otherwise we may be tempted to believe success and failure is the same thing, and so building a business impossible.
The danger talked about by Drucker is success develops habits, which at a certain part of the process are necessary for that very success. Those habits are based on a decision made upon the circumstances existing at the time the initiative was started.
It's very easy for those initial reasonings to no longer be the same as they were when decisions were being made. So while today the success of the moment may cause us to think everything's ok, in reality the entire market we serve could have shifted, and we are only a step or to from becoming irrelevant.
Think of driving a car full of gas that you believe will get you to your destination. You may not have known about the number of steep hills and stops and starts you have to make on the journey, and so even though the car started from the right destination and the drivers' had their eyes on the place they wanted to go, they ran out of gas way before they got there.
The journey started out just fine, but the journey changed as the car drove on. That changing of the journey kept the car and the gas it was running on from being completed. The car simply runs out of gas.
We must understand that that failure and success can be rooted in the same tree. They can grow together if we don't understand one can play off the other. Success and failure are obviously not the same, but they have the same root.
As Drucker said, the more successful we are, the more painful and hard it can be to change the old habits that brought about past success.
We must be able and willing to uproot ourselves from our past successes in order to bring ourselves to more success. The process isn't easy, but it is definitely necessary.
Look at those that have had long, successful careers, and you'll find those that went through a series of difficult processes in order to continue on in their endeavors. What they did was time and again uproot themselves from past successes in order to reach even new heights. It's the only thing that will bring successful longevity to a person or an organization.
Other Peter Drucker Resources:
The Man Who Invented Management
Beyond the Information Revolution
Remember to Sign up for my feed, bizzbite and digg this!
Sponsored link: The outsourcing every manager requires - Tampa Locksmith
Comment Preview