Ari on Business

Natural Law #8: To get to greatness you’ve gotta keep getting better. All the time!

The most successful organizations and individuals understand this. From medicine to the arts, non-profits, or pro sports—the best in any field are all going after improvement all the time. You can call it continuous improvement, kaizen, or whatever you like. The reality is that if we’re not learning, growing, and improving then the marketplace is going to pass us by.

Early on in my leadership life I used to think we’d get to some point where success would allow us to coast. Man, was I ever wrong on that one. Fortunately I realized the error of my ways in time. In truth, I think running the business well actually gets harder, not easier, the longer you go on. But once I made peace with that reality, then living this rule was infinitely less stressful for me.

(By the way, it took me a long time to learn it but this drive for improvement can very much coexist with appreciation for what we’ve already achieved.)

Twelve Natural Laws of Business:
There are organizational principles that consistently work and, in the big scheme of things, follow a natural order. We call these “Natural Laws of Business.” Our experience here is that the natural laws are applicable for any business regardless of size, scale, age or product offering. Exceptions exist, but I’ll say up front I wouldn’t recommend expending much energy trying to prove these rules to be wrong.