When I think about innovation, I regularly ask myself, “What would perfect look like?” The reason that I ask this question often is because the picture of “perfect” changes with the times, circumstance, and who I have become as a person. So, I am always on the look out for the things that must be tweeked in order to make my business stay on the cutting edge.
As you consider what is perfect to you, you then have decide what changes have to be made for that picture to become the very nature of your business. This kind of thinking can’t be done in minutes. It takes time to create the right picture and then create plan adjustments that will keep you on line for creating the picture.
I want to leave you with five thoughts about what perfect might look like:
- Perfect should be the cause in which your whole life is centered. Ideally your business should be the overflow of who you are and what your life is all about. Choosing a business simply because of the financial possibilities will never provide you with anything that resembles “perfect.”
- Perfect should be something you create for you and your family to be a part of. Successful businesses all around the world cause people to abandon family to gain and maintain success. Family will never be sacrificed in a perfect business.
- Perfect should cause you to see yourself as a benefit to your world rather than a shark looking for its next meal. When profits become more important than people and sales volume than those who are your customers, you cannot know “perfect.”
- Perfect should wake you up in the morning with a head full of new ideas that have to be filtered through before you can sleep at night. When your business is merely an extension of a much fuller life, you will never run out of innovative ideas about how to make things better for now and for the future.
- Perfect should always reach out. Too many business owners never really give back to their society in any meaningful way. If successful business owners would choose to care for people more and look for powerful ways to bring change to the lives of those less fortunate, the world would not struggle as it does today.
I guess, as I close out this post, that this is what perfect looks like to me. You are going to have to make your own choices and will be responsible for the consequences of those choices. But whatever you decide, keep working and keep thinking until you see perfection in your business.