One of the things that happens in business is that even the greatest thing ever is eventually forgotten. The polaroid had a huge impact on the picture market and now only a few nostalgically inclined folks still have the ability to take a picture, print it anywhere, and have it physically for a long time. If you listen to investment analyst today, oil companies will be a thing of the past any day now. Renewable is going to be the thing. It may take fifty years, but eventually they will be right.
When I was at my first real job after college, we created a training course for Total Quality Management. The main outcome the company wanted was continuous improvement. After a huge project failure and many rounds of layoffs, they probably never figured out if the training did any good for the company. At a minimum, it was my first opportunity to see how complacency kills.
Consistent with the world around him, one week into the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, Calvin created a club that didn’t allow girls. It was a great idea to him, for a few seconds anyway, until it left him all alone in the treehouse. Many, many times over in our world, people have created clubs with the idea of getting a particular group together to make their lives better. The problem is that any exclusion in a group creates animosity in those excluded and it ends up harming those who thought it was good in the first place.
In this case, Calvin was left all alone. Loneliness is a terrible condition for a person. God made all of us to long for a relationship with Him and with others. We find the best relationship with God through salvation in Christ, but people are still better off interacting with others and avoiding the emotional pitfalls that brings.
The obvious take away from the book on business is to continually work to make your company better in every way possible, and the same applies to your own money-making ability (always get better). But a not so obvious area to avoid complacency is in your fellowship with other people. If you only have friends your own age you made as a kid, they will eventually all move away or die and leave you alone. Only having a small set of friends leaves you stagnant and not learning from people with new ideas, different backgrounds, different ages, different everything.
There is an old saying about new friends are silver and old friends are gold. Both are precious. The thing about new friends is they don’t grow on trees. They grow by meeting new people, learning about new people, and being a friend to them. Think about when was the last time you made a new friend? Aren’t you called to love your neighbor? Are you being complacent in this area?
Our world is ruled by people. People are flawed. To overcome the flaws in human interaction, we have to be active. No one ever made the world a better place by sitting alone in their tree house their whole lives. The six-year-old Calvin did not find fun by discriminating against his classmate. You won’t find it being complacent.