The Obstacle Preventing You From Reinventing Your Business

Reinvention is the key to future success, and the future may be as soon as this year, or even this month. Depending upon where your business is at the moment, you may need reinvention today if things are not working as well as you need or want them to. You may be in the pit of disaster and needing to reinvent immediately, or you may be doing well, but reinvention keeps your future bright.

Remember Polaroid? They failed to reinvent themselves when photography went digital. Many of the communications companies failed to recognize what Skype saw for the future and failed to reinvent themselves and Skype stole that show. Why didn’t Microsoft invent a search engine like Google? And on it goes, because reinvention is very difficult and challenging. We are all trapped in and controlled by our history and we must break free from that yoke. It is not just about adding stores, or adjusting product line or altering marketing approaches, it is about stepping into a new business paradigm, maybe even contrary to what you have been doing. That’s reinvention.

Here is the barrier we all must penetrate, dissolve or escape from if we are to consider reinventing our business. We must destroy the past, root out the history that controls us all. So many are trapped in what they know to be true now and cannot discover and plan what will be true tomorrow. That is the barrier preventing reinvention. You must destroy your history–what you know and how you do it–to reinvent. Being trapped in old technology is a perfect example of having to destroy ones history to see the future. When the world went digital, Polaroid remained trapped in film. When the auto industry was going towards economy and alternative energies, the US auto industry remained where they have been, controlled by their history, and Toyota took away their share of the market and became number one.

Despite your extensive knowledge of what customers may want today, you cannot allow that knowledge and experience to prevent you from seeing what they will want in the future. Difficult? Absolutely, but this is the job of an entrepreneur who wants to remain in business and not become history. You need to rethink your finances, operations and marketing. Reinvention can come to any sector or all three. Where you end, who knows. Once you cut the ties from your past you are free to roam in the future. Destroy your history, do not allow it to control your future. That is reinvention.

As if this isn’t hard enough to do, we must do this while living in the present, producing as we are and building on our legacy. Doubly difficult. However, this must be done to survive and prosper either in the short-term (for many) or the long-term (for most). Remember, Polaroid didn’t.