Every year in December I have a breakfast in my calendar scheduled many weeks in advance so that no one misses it. The guests are a group of friends who, once upon a time, worked together for the same company, in the same team. Even if the all of us left that organisation ages ago, we shaped a community that stick together through time, space and the careers of each one of us. Throughout the year we are in touch sharing projects, recommendations, information, news, profiles and gossips. To some extent, we could say that we still work together in one way or another, so when we meet physically once a year, it’s as if we’ve seen each other last week. What keeps this community together, active and thriving is that we always talk about today and tomorrow, but never about yesterday. The past is simply a temporary space where we met, but not what determines our relationship, which is always looking towards the future from the present. Actually, it is very difficult to build something sustainable which is constantly revolving around the past and its nostalgic narratives.
When we look at this from a business perspective, in some organisations I detect a behaviour that is a paradox: they are constantly looking at yesterday to build their today and their tomorrow. And when I say ‘they are constantly looking at yesterday’ I do not mean that they reflect on their legacy and their essence. I mean that they reuse nostalgic practices and call a bunch of business dinosaurs to solve challenges linked to the present and the future. With this idea in mind, they dust off tools and modus operandi that worked twenty or thirty years ago. They trust external advisors who made it big with their companies some decades ago (those companies are now closed or sold to some investors) and repeat over and over again the recipes that worked for them then (much of those recipes no longer makes sense in today’s world and some of them are not even legal anymore, but the old-fashioned advisors don’t even know it). They hire consultants (recommended by those business dinosaurs) who have been doing the same thing for 40 years with the same tools and approaches. And more practices like that. The result is always the same: strategies and ideas with an outdated and stale patina that do not provide a real, practical and sustainable solution. So, in the end, the organisation is left worse off than it was: with useless tools, having spent money on obsolete advisors and experts and with confused teams (which is an absolute drama for the business).
Let us not get lost in nostalgia and rely on logic: it is impossible to build forwards when you are constantly looking backwards. Let us use our common sense and, if we want to thrive, let us set our sights on today and tomorrow, without listening to a bunch of outdated business dinosaurs.
