The white elephant in the room

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Not everyone know the story about the “the white elephant in the room”, most people only know the story about “the elephant in the room”.

What once was an brilliant idea can, today, be an enormous economic burden due to that circumstances has changed and business is being conducted in a different way compared to before.

It’s like when a village has a main road passing through the village and suddenly a new highway is built around the town and no longer channeling drivers trough the community.

What was once the right way to do business, might not be the right way anymore, business change, and you must too as a leader.

The way of working changes over time. The way you managed your business was once the right way, but now you find that it doesn´t work for you. And you need to change. Both your way of working, as how you are as a business leader.

Not long ago everyone wanted to have their shops in the center of the city, after a while shopping centers started to pop up everywhere outside cities, and now, everything is going virtual.

It’s the same with a lot of business ideas over the years, once a great idea , but today it can be obsolete for different reasons.

Every kind of business has a life span, after a while, if you do not continuously improve yourself you will be by passed by others, or you might, if lucky, hold on to your business due to your market position or size.

If you are big enough you can buy up any competition, but if you, as many other companies, don’t have that luxury, then you are forced to adapt one way or the other.

The most common mistake we see is that companies either wait to long with changing, or in other cases, they are changing to much at the same time, and therefore lose track of their core business.

Successful companies that have managed to make this transition without too much of a struggle and by doing it in a more considered and manageable way, have in many cases brought in outside help who gives a different outlook on matters.

Just because you like to start small, take your time, and have the stamina to think it through thoroughly, does not automatically mean that your solution will be a better solution.

Not everyone has the luxury of having endless of time, in most cases we are pushed or forced by external forces in different forms, and in many cases this will shape your outcome regardless of your efforts to find a  great solution to your business model.

In another case, if you do not find a way forward, you need to start to take a look at all the things you can cut down or cut out of your business model. But in many ways, this is only prolonging the agony, not solving it, but it´s one way of doing it if you only want to buy time.

My tip to you is to take a closer look at how you are running your business model, not necessarily what or why you are doing it. By breaking down your issues and trying to see how you can achieve the same outcome but in a different way, then you will get somewhere.

If you would like to get a bit further down the road, and maybe have some outside help in how to shift the paradigms you are in, try a consultant that is brave enough to challenge your thinking in a respectful way.

 

Stay safe

Christopher Bell Blomquist Consulting
Managing Director
Lead Negotiator Consultant
Scotwork Sweden.

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