1. © Cotton Innovations Ltd 2015
For further information on this subject and other business tools contact:
Brad Cotton – brad@cottonci.com
Telephone +44 (0)7867 305 043
Other newsletters at cottonci.com/blogs
This weekend as a family, we
were busy in the garden
planting the seedlings,
vegetables, fruit and flowers.
Loading up the hanging
baskets, ready for the summer
round of barbeques and garden parties we
would like to host.
Since then, we have admired our planting and the
sizeable growth in these plants and the fruit at the end
of each day. In reflecting on conversations I had with
some business leaders during the last month.
Strangely, these were about
nature’s growth cycles, as
opposed to the artificially-forced
cycles we create, which are driven
by ‘perceived customer wants’ and
‘shareholder expectations’.
When we set out our strategies for our businesses, our
expectation is for either immediate change, or
immediate success both in culture and in output.
We no longer play the ‘long game’.
Unlike the garden, which has its fixed
growing season and harvest period, we
somehow think that we can make
things happen faster than they should.
We force business to grow rapidly,
resulting in:
 Businesses expanding faster than the cash
flow can support.
 Launching new models into the market place
which appear to have no advantage over the
old one.
 Overly stressing employees, resulting in key
people leaving the business
If we were to be more strategic, thoughtful and
prepared to play the “long game”, the growth may be
better than we had hoped for, and the sustainability of
the business would probably be stronger.
“Only buy something that you'd be
perfectly happy to hold if the market
shut down for 10 years.” Warren Buffett
In a recent documentary on the
company “Lego” they discussed its
operations since its bankruptcy in the 70’s. It is now
mainly driven not by reacting to the latest great
opportunity, but growing naturally from its core
values, along with those values from employees and
the community which has embraced them.
“Only buy something that you'd be perfectly happy
to hold if the market
shut down for 10 years.”
It is also driven through finding people who equally
aspire to these values to join them as employees. This
has created a ‘family’ of people with similar
aspirations, which means it has become a generational
company with a generational (sustainable) growth.
Studies show the accepted period
to simply effect a change in
attitude is between 18 months to
2 years, whereas for the culture
and ethos within a company to be
effectively changed takes some 7 to 9 years.
In other words, it comes when enough “new blood”
arrives who have the courage to change the practices
which we formerly adhered to.
Accepting change is something we are not good at,
particularly the natural growth cycles of our business
and products. We tend to be impatient, and are always
looking for the immediate result, forcing growth or
shorten lead times. Maybe we need to take more of a
longer-term view of the future, and in so doing, ask
ourselves how much more we could achieve?