The pioneering baseball star Satchel Paige may have said it best: “Don’t look back. Something may be gaining on you.” Like baseball, however, looking back seems to have become the Great American Pastime. You can see evidence of this in our popular media obsessions with previous eras, from remakes of old moves to TV programs that romanticize decades gone by. Unfortunately, keeping your ideas, attitudes, and preferences rooted in the past can prove detrimental to the future of your business. It becomes another form of the “analysis paralysis” that I have outlined in previous posts. Let’s examine the potential threat nostalgic thinking can pose for your organization’s innovation.
When Nostalgia Is Bad for Business
It’s hard to deny that, for many industries and businesses, there’s money to be made from nostalgia itself. Previous generations respond to callbacks to their favorite products and brands even as the current generation discovers them for the first time. But even the “nostalgia business” can hurt its beneficiaries. For example, both the film industry and video game industry can have been criticized for their obsession with re-introducing and enhancing old properties instead of offering new ideas. Constantly providing variations on the same old theme may satisfy customers in the short term, but in the long term, it makes you appear stale and unimaginative.
Nostalgia can also produce “hardening of the arteries” in terms of your business’s internal structure, processes, and productivity. You might relish the freewheeling days of your company’s early years, but that doesn’t mean you should hang onto its original legal and financial structure. Growth may require the willingness to re-think your business entity, personnel, distributorship, and other key factors. As global and national economic trends change, you must be ready to change with them or even anticipate these changes before they occur so you can be the first on the scene to take advantage of the new business climate. From offering a more flexible workplace to relying more heavily on outsourced business models, you must be able to embrace the one constant in life – change.
Anticipating New Laws, Trends, and Possibilities
As the business world changes, so does the law. From revisions of the tax code to changes in corporate ethics and HR regulations, the law doesn’t stand still – and neither can you or your business. Becoming too comfortable with the old, familiar way of running your business can put that business at risk of committing serious legal breaches. You have to be ready to re-evaluate your legal status, comprehend both the current law and likely trends, and agree to any recommended modifications in your processes that might keep you ahead of the curve.
The human race can credit its success to change and innovation. Human beings were nomadic hunter-gatherers for countless millennia, traveling constantly and struggling to survive in anything larger than tribal clusters. The innovation of agriculture led to an enormous flowering of civilization as cities became possible, reading and writing became a necessity, and entrepreneurs went into business. Where would we be today if nostalgia for “the good old days” had preventing someone from planting and harvesting those first crops?
Don’t Limit Yourself – Learn, Unlearn, and Relearn
The dangers of self-limited thinking were stated all too clearly by the visionary Alvin Toffler, who said, “The illiterate of the 21st Century will not be those who cannot read or write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Are you willing to overwrite outmoded thoughts, beliefs, and processes with new ones – not just once, but continuously? Only in this manner can business owners remodel their organizations to keep them innovative, creative, productive, and future-proof.
Many business owners are reluctant to give up on what they’ve known and profited from in the past. But the future may hold even better and brighter prospects for those willing to turn their attention toward it.
© 2018 Matthew W. Harrison and Harrison Law, PLLC All Rights Reserved
This website and article have been prepared by Harrison Law, PLLC for informational purposes only and does not, and is not intended to, constitute legal or financial advice. The information is not provided in the course of an attorney-client relationship and is not intended to substitute for legal advice from an attorney licensed in your jurisdiction.
