Connemara Daly: Staying Alert! (June 2020)

It is a known fact that if a frog is immersed in a pan of water and the vessel is heated up ever so gently; the frog will fall asleep and will eventually be boiled to death. This is for illustrative purposes only to stress that we always need to stay wide awake and vigilant to external threats around us.

A CEO of an American company I once worked for remarked on one occasion: ‘We always need to stay sharp, focused and constantly walk on the balls of our feet and continually sniff the air’. We cannot afford to become complacent or we will quickly be overtaken by our competitors’.

 In the USA, during the 1840’s, the Wells Fargo company had risen to high prominence and delivered the mail from coast to coast. Their strategy in this particular year was to breed faster horses so that the mail could be delivered faster and save them on overall costs. What they had not noticed was that Samuel Morse was a few hundred miles down the road putting the finishing touches to his telegraph machine which was to have a revolutionary effect on business. Wells Fargo never saw it coming and it had a detrimental effect on their business. They thought they were in the mail delivery business, but, in actual fact they were in the communications business.

 If businesses are out of control and in constant turmoil there will not be time to look around to see what is going on elsewhere. We must make time to do this or we can be put out of business overnight. Take a look at your own operation and business and if it looks like a slowly boiling frog, take remedial action immediately to correct. We need to keep an eye on the bigger picture and be alert to the changing trends.

When the lion wakes up in the morning he has to run faster than the slowest antelope or he does not eat. When the antelope wakes up he has to outrun the fastest lion or he will get eaten. One thing is certain though, both the lion and the antelope have to wake up each morning and hit the ground running.

It is no different in business at the moment. We must constantly remain alert, awake and vigilant to the external threats, and a program of continuous improvement must always be in place to ensure competitiveness and future survival. We cannot afford to become complacent and live in the shadow of past glories. Cost competitiveness is a critical factor in modern technology and business.

Take a look around your own business to see where duplication can be removed and wasteful processes eliminated. In our modern environment there is no room for excessive fat and the cloth must now be cut to suit the measure.

As we live through this global pandemic, we should never lose hope and always be positive for the future. Our ancestors had to deal with wars and the steady loss of life to diseases that have now been eradicated for decades. Our challenges are small in comparison. We are made of the same stuff as our ancestors, and like them, we’ll cope with this present challenge also.

‘The heights by which great men reached and kept, were not attained by sudden flight, but they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night’ – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.