A stagnant business becomes a marsh

Business stagnation begins when a business stands still. But chasing something new every day isn't motion either. Motion is knowing where, why and how.

Leave a piece of bread out in a corner, uncovered, and don't touch it. A day or two later it is no longer edible. All it did was sit there.

The human body is the same. A body that doesn't move slowly gets heavy, and making it light again takes a lot of work.

Water is the same. Water that stays put becomes a marsh. The sea is alive because it moves.

This is what I believe: The necessity of existence is to be in motion. Anything that stays still rots. A business too.

"If it works, don't touch it"

People say "it's fine the way it is" and "if it works, don't touch it". I disagree with this very much.

I believe there is always a better way to do things. What works today is no exception.

I don't mean you should change your work every day. I'll come back to that.

The marsh I saw up close

I have worked at a company that knew, on paper, what its business was: repairing equipment. In practice it didn't know what it wanted to do. It didn't know how to reach customers or where its income was supposed to come from.

All its energy went into being able to pay salaries at the end of the month. It couldn't manage even that, and salaries sometimes arrived once every few months.

Its managers each went their own way, and that made things worse.

In the end a greedy person came along and took over the company, and nothing was left of its identity. Today, all that remains of that company is its building.

That company was standing still. It had no motion.

Heading somewhere new every day isn't motion either

Standing still doesn't have only one form. A business that heads toward a different thing every day is standing still too.

I have seen businesses whose only goal was: "We want to make money." Yes, we all want to make money. But it has to be clear by what route, how, and why.

You can make money buying and selling gold. You can make it in property, in electronic services, in a recycling plant. Someone who only knows they want money goes after technology one day and something else the next. You can't do all of them at once, and in the end none of them brings in any money.

This is a marsh too. It changes course so often that it gets ahead on none of them.

Motion means answering three questions

As I see it, your business is in motion when you know the answers to these three questions and work to get there:

1. Where are you going?
2. Why do you want to go there?
3. How do you want to get there?

The most important one is "why". "Why" is the reason for moving. If you have no reason to move, you don't move.

If you know the "why" but not the "how", the problem can be solved. Someone can show you the way: left here, then right. But no one can show the way to someone who doesn't know where they want to go. They don't have an address at all.

First a lake, then a sea

A large holding company can enter any field. It is a sea in itself.

A smaller business doesn't have that capacity, and in my view it shouldn't do that anyway. It can have several lines of work, as long as they are decided in advance, limited, and don't change every day. It has to move forward on those few defined paths until it grows and turns from a lake into a small sea. Then it can think about other fields too.

So my disagreement with "don't touch it" doesn't mean you should change course every day. Motion means going further along the paths you have chosen, and doing the work in a better way each time.

I'm not asking you to do anything

You don't need to do anything after reading this post. Just keep those three questions in the back of your mind.

The company I described is real; I have left out its name and anything that would identify it.