What If You're Right... And Still Wrong?  

"How do you know?" my wife asked.

Because. I knew. Banks don't surrender their collateral and trust borrowers to pay them later. That's the point of collateral. I thought she understood that. I told her.

“What’s the harm in asking?” she said.

So I did.

The bank said yes.

The buyer paid the bank, the bank gave the buyer the pink slip, we paid off the loan as scheduled.

Nancy didn't understand banking better than I did. She didn't have some brilliant financial insight I had overlooked.

She simply wasn't constrained by what I knew.

“It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.” —Author unknown

What we know comes from experience. And experience becomes dangerous when the conditions that gave us that experience change.

In my book, Businesses Don’t Fail, They Commit Suicide, I write about surviving success and am often asked what I mean.

Every leader I’ve spoken to wants to be successful. When I ask them what success means, the responses are predictable.

•         More sales.
•         More profits.
•         More customers.

Yes, these things are common examples of success. They also represent some form of growth. Growth creates change, and change is disruptive. The good news, change, when driven by success, is predictable.

A business cannot manage scheduling and vacations for one hundred and fifty employees the way it did when it had fifteen. A business cannot manage receivables, payables, and inventory or provide client support for three hundred customers the way it did when it had thirty.

Are you structurally able to manage more sales or more customers? If so, you’re probably over-staffed or over-built. If not, increasing your ability to do so will increase overhead. Either way, growth changes how you consume your three finite resources: people, time, and money. How much of your increased profitability will get eaten up with increased overhead? And how will all those changes impact your day-to-day operational routines?

The problem begins to appear out of the cloud of joy success evokes when looking at its impact through the ‘Arc of Success’. 

When an organization implements a new idea and it’s successful, it creates growth. That growth creates complexity. Complexity creates the need for controls. Controls create a loss of flexibility. The loss of flexibility changes the environment. When the environment changes, rules, roles, systems, structures, goals, and responsibilities all need to be reevaluated for efficacy.

This is one of the underlying reasons organizations don’t like change. It makes things that worked well stop working so well. It’s far easier to say something that worked before should work again. Unfortunately, that’s where success, a.k.a., growth, and change can come back and bite you.

Leaders get caught in this experiential trap quite often. Successful behaviors and accumulated “known truths” become assumptions about what remains possible and effective.

Initially, routine can be comforting. Over time, and without thought, familiarity breeds complacency that inevitably leads to costly bad habits and crippling assumptions.

Success changes the environment. Experience keeps reminding us what worked in the one we just left. Recognizing when the lessons of experience no longer apply is how you begin to survive your success.

How do you know when experience helps you make a better decision and when it prevents you from seeing one?

Start by questioning what you know. What has changed since you learned it? What assumptions are you making because of what worked before? What might someone who doesn’t share your experience see that you don’t?

Experience is one of your greatest assets. The danger begins when you stop questioning whether what it taught you is still true.

Sometimes surviving success means being willing to ask, “What’s the harm in asking?”

The challenge is to retain the value of experience without allowing it to define the boundaries of what’s possible. If your success has changed your organization, some of what you know will no longer be true.

Want to explore what your success may have changed—and what what you may need to rethink? Let’s spend 20 minutes in an initial discovery conversation.

No sales pitch. No selling. Guaranteed.

Questions? Email larry@mandelberg.biz. Want to learn more about surviving success and building an organization that generates sustainable, profitable growth? It’s all in Businesses Don’t Fail, They Commit Suicide — how to survive success and thrive in good times and bad.