Every Success Buys A Ticket To Another Challenge

Business savant Peter Drucker once quipped, “There are an enormous number of leaders who have retired on the job.”

Avoiding a solution to a volatile, menacing and potentially destructive problem is not discernment, its cowardice. As long as a threat from a negative element exists in any organization, nothing is solved; and by the day a team, an organization or body of government will never reach its true potential.

Sometimes the subtle decline known as erosion takes place after a milestone, a record year, or a championship. A group sees its record breaking performance as a permanent monument to their success; silently and simultaneously the erosion has already begun. If that occurs managers, athletes, CEO’s (including media group principals) should cherish their memories, tend to their stock options and pensions, and pick up some retirement destination brochures because that’s the sum of what the future offers in the event they’ve retired on the job.

On this topic NBA championship Coach Pat Riley didn’t mince words: “Any Coach that doesn’t kick complacent ass on his team will end up kicking his own.”

How does complacency creep into an organization’s environment? Several ways; glittering congratulations to an organization that has just reached a milestone; record breaking ratings, new sales records, and honors bestowed from the company’s hierarchy; maybe even other media’s salutations can help incubate the Success Disease. Caution: while you’re being infected, a competitor is plotting to beat you…today.

The psychology of entitlement is an ever looming threat in any organization. The Autopsy of Complacency: (1) Discounting the need for a fresh dream. (2) Seeing “work ethic” as it were for others. (3) Leaning on your past wins assuming they will come back around again using the same plans with the same effort.

Complacency is the last barrier between an achieving team, its potential for breaking records and owning lasting fame.

Robert Frost captured it best: “The world is full of willing people, some willing to work, others willing to let them.”

After a great win, a record breaking quarter, or a glorious victory of any kind, the hardest engagement to fight is the first small dust-up of the next big challenge.

Radio has seldom been more challenged, yet on the edge of new opportunity! If not you, who?