Blow With The Wind

A company’s response to change determines its chances of survival—as Jonathan MacDonald writes in his recent book, “When the winds of change blow, some people build walls and others build windmills.”

- Jonathan Macdonald

I grew up in the family business. I say ‘grew up in’ literally. My parents worked seven days a week, so my standard location before I could walk was underneath the till. Then when I could walk I was pricing goods and cleaning stuff. Things were far more straightforward when there was one other member of staff, than fifteen years later with over 20,000 items of stock and almost 100 people involved. I lived through every element of that scale, all the way through to my parents’ retirement when I pivoted the business into a different sector.

I can remember the days when stock control was manual. Paper and pen. I can remember when my dad and I booted up the first computer system, long before the World Wide Web, and we gazed in wonder at the black screen with green text saying Xenix. It was an extremely popular version of Unix in the ‘70s and ‘80s and it revolutionized our little company. We were able to link the tills to the ordering system, and then via a phone line we could actually communicate with suppliers. This was space-aged stuff at the time, I can assure you.

Every memory I have involves a change. A movement from one state to another. I remember that we did not really know what was coming around the corner—we just had a very clear objective in mind and the new tech available, or the changing customer expectations, were just part and parcel of running a business. We never considered that change would stop or that change was a bad thing, we just got on with it. Every day and every night.

It is what small businesses can do that large ones cannot so easily. When we are small we can flex more with the flow. I love that. I love being able to do a u-turn strategically, without having to explain it to Wall Street analysts. In Clayton M Christensen’s book