Article in brief: This article deals with the fluid nature of business processes and dependent success is on the ability to adapt to changing environments.
When you read interviews of owners of successful businesses, one thing is almost certain. When asked about the path their business has taken, many will respond by saying that the tasks they’ve done over the past years weren’t even in the original business plan, or that they had never considered going down the path they did.
No matter what comes your way, be it a project or business, there’s always that pearly, glistening image of your final creation. Keeping that vision in mind helps you stay determined and on track. But it can also detract you from the essential process of the journey that eventually leads a person there.
The business process is never a smooth, straight-sailing one. According to the business plan you spent months researching and carefully considering, getting from point A to B and finally Z seems fairly straightforward. But theory and practice are never the same and if you aren’t prepared for that, get ready for a wake-up call.
Things you hadn’t anticipated can be needed, and during the actual experience of setting up your business you will realize that there are perhaps other, more efficient ways for your business to function. Sometimes that can mean deviating from your initial plan and maybe changing some of your long-term goals.
Flexibility in business is key – if you aren’t able to adapt to the changing needs of an ever-rapidly evolving society, then your success will be limited and hard to come by. That is why it is important not to hold steadfast with tunnel vision to your original goals. If you were to focus solely on your original long-term goal, you risk two things:
Firstly, you may not be in that psychological mind-set to recognize potential fruitful endeavours. These opportunities may not be anything you initially had in mind for your business but embarking on them can lead to promising future partnerships.
Secondly, by focusing solely on your final goal, you won’t pay enough attention to the little details that are important in making up the final picture. So many things are required to feed into the bigger picture and it is sort of like a domino effect in the positive sense.
In light of all this, what’s the best way to approach goals in business? It is very important to have, from the outset, your long-term future plan. The plan not only includes an overarching vision, but also details such as statistics to be achieved. Leading up to that long-term goal must be several short-term goals to help achieve this. Thinking about and creating these short-term goals is a mental exercise in anticipating future scenarios. It also helps think of the long-term goal as a sort of synergy of different parts and helps you think outside the box when it comes to achieving these goals.
At the end of the day, it is vital to see the business process as something fluid, as something that has to change and adapt to the surroundings in order to succeed. Having long-term goals help give a business that determined edge but can also detract from fully utilizing the current environment. The best solution is to have a long-term plan made up of several short-term plans that feed into it but also to understand that sometimes, what you initially had in mind will be quite different from the end result and you just might end up preferring this path to the one you had originally conceived.
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