Up Your Business!: 7 Steps to Fix, Build, or Stretch Your Organization, Second Edition, Revised and Expanded

Chapter 6. Survive Success: How to Overcome the Six Temptations of Successful Organizations

The Enemy of Great Is Good

The enemy of great is good. The primary reason so few leaders or organizations ever become great is that they get good and they stop. They stop growing, learning, risking, and changing. They use their track records or prior successes as evidence they’ve arrived. Believing their own headlines, the leaders in these successful organizations are ready to write it down, build the manual, and document the formula. This mentality shifts their business from a growth to a maintenance mind-set, and trades in innovation for optimization.

Up Your Business! Bullet

Neither you nor your business ever “arrives.” You’re constantly in the process of becoming better or worse.

Perhaps you’ve seen—or been—a leader who reached the top of a mountain and opted to build a vacation home there rather than look for a higher mountain. Maybe you’ve even caught a case of acrophobia (fear of heights). In other words, you reached a certain point of success and decided it felt pretty good there. And you knew that if you were going to leave that comfortable spot you’d have to change something, risk something, learn something, or stretch something. So even though you never came right out and articulated it, you unconsciously decided to stay put and build a fence around what you had rather than continue to climb. If you’ve done this or are doing so now, you’re not alone. The world’s business chronicles ...