Accepting New Ideas While Remaining Competitive

Listen as Justin Craig discusses the paradox of continuing differently, and relentless innovation.

A challenge that’s faced by everyone in corporations, particularly in family businesses, there’s a nuance. There’s a challenge there, and we talk about this a lot with the next generations, to conquer the business. And that’s a very powerful sentence, or statement. They need to conquer the business. And you can establish what that means to say, ok, they need to take ownership and stamp their particular generation’s influence or stamp on the business. But to do that, they need to continue differently and that’s a paradox. To continue differently, and how do they do that? They need to learn the value of values, to see what distinguishes their company against other companies that are in the same markets that are competing for the same customer, that effectively have the same resources. So how do we do that? Well, in many ways, we set up an environment for them that they can understand what it means to be part of this business and how they can actually continue the legacy, be true to the previous generations but also have a long term orientation that sets it up for the generations that follow. And that requires creative thinking, it requires looking at the periphery, looking at what’s coming ahead, long term planning, not short term planning, we need to have an environment or champion innovative culture, that we have innovation that is continuous and relentless. Probably the word relentless there is the one I’d like you to take home with you. Relentless.