As we slowly come out of enforced COVID-19 lockdowns, it is a great time to re-evaluate your business and question if you are thinking critically about your business…or if you are just going to return to doing things the same as you have always done them.
Rita Mae Brown once said that that if you do the same thing over and over and expect a different result, you are insane (this quote is usually misattributed to Benjamin Franklin).
This rule reminds me of four friends of mine who enjoy pig (boar) shooting. One weekend a year they charter a plane, fly to an isolated property, and rough it for two days while they roam the area and shoot pigs. Not really my cup of tea but each to their own.
Sometimes they are ‘lucky’ enough to bring a head back as a trophy.
My friends told me that at the end of their last weekend, the charter plane landed on the dirt strip ready to take them back home. They had all been successful and were ready to load the plane with their gear and four heads.
The pilot of the small plane took one look at the four guys and their equipment and the huge dead pig heads and declared that there was too much weight in all of that for the plane to get up in the air.
A small argument ensued, and finally my friends won the argument when they said that the pilot who picked them up the previous year had let them take four heads on the plane with them. Aussies hate to be outdone, so that was enough for this pilot to tell them to load the plane up.
The plane then started off down the bumpy rocky runway, and as it bounced along gathering speed, the pilot pulled back on the stick, only to have the plane not lift off. There was too much weight. They ended up ploughing into a ditch at the end of the runway, knocking out all five people on board.
As they started to wake up, a little groggy, one of the guys looked around and quizzed the other guys as to where they were. One of the others was a bit more alert, and when he looked around, he declared that they were in exactly the same spot as where they ended up the previous year. You see, they had done the same thing they did the previous year, but for some reason, they expected a different result. Insane!