The Shark

Brief: This post goes over the importance of progression in business. Constantly evolving and trying to be better is the only way to ensure your companies future.

“What’s very dangerous is to not evolve, not invent, not improve the customer experience.” – Jeff Bezos, Amazon.

What Jeff Bezos is alluding to with his above quote is that being stationary in business is death. The world is evolving, you are evolving, everything around you is changing whether it is visible to you or not. Why should business be any different?

You should compare your business to a shark. The biggest baddest son of a bitch in the ocean. In order for sharks to breath they need water to be passing over their gills. If they remain stationary in still water they cannot take in oxygen and they die. Your business needs to be a shark. You need to be constantly and instinctually moving forward. Always making forward progress in order to survive. Whether that’s new products, services or simply improving the customer experience, anything to better your company.

Progress eventually will lead you to your next success or in the sharks case, its next meal. The shark doesn’t have the option to be still. As long as it has a beat in its heart it will be moving forward, progressing, chasing something. Your business may appear to be surviving without forward progress but while you’re content being stationary, the world and your industry is evolving. No matter how far ahead you think you are, if you deny progress, someone or something will catch up and eventually overtake you. Do I really need to remind you about the tortoise and the hare?

Just because you have made it this far does not mean you’re exempt from failure. The day before Uber launched taxi companies probably felt untouchable. Just this winter Fido offered a unlimited plan with 10GB of data for $60 and 1 week later every single cell phone provider in Canada matched the deal to retain customers. You’re naive to think that your customers are loyal and your business can’t be forgotten in the blink of an eye.

Think about how you and your company got to where you are today. How did that happen? Did you just do exactly what the competition was doing and hope people liked you better? Probably not. You probably found a way to somehow be better than they are. Now you are the competition and someone is spending all of their time and money thinking of ways to become better than you.

So, back to my analogy, you’re left with 2 choices. Either you can do nothing and hope that nobody is trying to take your business or, you can be a shark.

Keep chasing your Cloud!