We are all prisoners of our past, products of our generation and influenced by who we have known and what we have experienced, much of which has been beyond our control. Some are worse off than others and just a few are more aware of their blind spots. But everyone has a firm belief that an equally intelligent and informed person would disagree with.
And this also applies to business.
Our past experiences in business condition our vision (creating paradigms) of what is possible and what we should do in the future. The problem is that not everything we have done in the past will serve us well in the future. We may not even be in the same business 5 years from now and even much less time due to the high velocity with which technology changes.
There is a famous story about how the railway companies missed a great opportunity. They did not understand that they were in the transportation business, not the railroad business. They missed the opportunity with the airlines.
In the same way, we must be attentive to how our past experiences and our current business can blind us to new opportunities that we cannot see at the moment. “History repeats itself only the actor changes”, as a famous song (La Balada del Pianista - Jose Feliciano) says. The multiple complaints, discontent and low level of consumer satisfaction that we glean from our analysis of the solar market in different regions of the world when using our Integration Coefficient IC, tells us that solar companies today have failed to understand that we are in the business of sustainability to avoid the disastrous consequences of climate change and not in the business of renewable energy components.
And this commercial blindness makes them lose opportunities against organizations that focus on macro objectives that empower the consumer, society and therefore the planet.
Gretchen Rubin is one of today's most influential and thought-provoking observers of happiness and human nature and a highly acclaimed writer, known for her ability to distill and convey complex ideas with an affinity for new tools and platforms, and furthermore, founder of “The Happiness Project”, which has helped create an ecosystem of imaginative products and tools to make people become happier, healthier, more productive, and more creative. She once said:
“What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while.”
This leads us to understand that it is easy to take this into account one day. But it's hard to do over a lifetime. That's why great results rarely come from doing things just once. Rather, they come from doing things many times, for a long time and with macro objectives. And more when things are done in a disruptive way.
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