Curiosity may have killed the cat, but complacency is what killed the company. In this episode of By Your Life, we will talk about the risk of becoming complacent and the importance of always being vigilant.
Mass Readings Audio
http://ccc.usccb.org/cccradio/NABPodcasts/18_12_02.mp3
The First Sunday of Advent – December 2, 2018
Welcome to the thirty-sixth episode of By Your Life. Thank you for joining me. If your haven’t already, please subscribe via iTunes, Stitcher, or on the right side of the page so I can send you notifications when each new episode is posted. And please forward to a friend you think would benefit from By Your Life.
My goal is to inspire, empower, support, challenge, and encourage you to connect Sunday, with Monday-Friday, in a secular, business world. It is my desire to help you live our Catholic faith in the marketplace, and to trust that it is good for business. I hope to offer you practical ways to go forth and glorify the Lord by your life.
In this edition, we will reflect on the readings for the First Sunday of Advent. As we prepare for the coming of our Lord, both in the celebration of Christmas and at the end of time, we are reminded not to be caught unprepared. In the Gospel, Jesus warns, “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap. (Lk 21:34) In business, the warning might be, “Beware that your company does not become complacent and the competition catches you by surprise like a thief in the night.”
Beware that your company does not become complacent and the competition catches you by surprise like a thief in the night.What does it mean to be complacent? Dictionary.com defines it as being “pleased, especially with oneself or one’s merits, advantages, situation, etc., often without awareness of some potential danger or defect.” We can think of many businesses that are no more because they rested on their laurels and their competition totally interrupted their business model often by leveraging changes in technology.
For example, think about the last time you saw a telephone directory. I had one dumped in my driveway a few months ago. I picked it up and looked at it as I carried it to the recycling bin and was surprised that somebody actually paid for ads in that thing. And what about video rental companies who were displaced by digital on-demand, classic retailers driven out by online giants, and service industries like taxis that are currently being challenged by ride-share companies.
Many of these companies like Blockbuster and Sears were leaders in their industries until they weren’t. They clung to the success they achieved in their business model and worried about protecting what they had. In the meantime, they failed to acknowledge that the world was changing around them. They were like the football team that gets conservative too early in the fourth quarter only to have their competition come from behind to beat them.
Author and leadership guru, Robin Sharma, said “Success is seductive. It can make one complacent, and inefficient, and stale.” It can also make one bankrupt.
“Success is seductive. It can make one complacent, and inefficient, and stale.” ~ Robin Sharma @RobinSharmaThey had to know it was coming. The digital era didn’t happen overnight. Neither did the economic downturn of 2008-2009. No one should have been surprised by it, but with real estate prices skyrocketing, everyone from developers, to real estate agents, to mortgage brokers, to title companies, kept riding the wave until they crashed.
At that time, we had a client in the surveying business. They too were riding the real estate boom wave by doing surveys for condo conversions. It made up a significant part of their company’s revenue, but the owners knew that it was only a matter of time before it went away. However, this client wasn’t complacent. While they were benefiting from the real estate boom, they invested in marketing to the mining industry, a niche where they had special capabilities. By the time the condo conversion market dried up, which literally happened overnight, they had effectively developed the mining segment to more than replaced the revenue they lost in the tanking real estate market.
Are you complacent? You become complacent the minute you think you’re not!
You become complacent the minute you think you’re not!Below is a picture of a model of how people grow and develop that I like to use to explain the process of how we can slide into complacency.
As you move from left to right, you move from incompetence to competence. The other side of the matrix from top to bottom is moving from unconscious to the conscious. This creates a matrix with four quadrants; unconscious incompetence, conscious incompetence, conscious competence and unconscious competence.
If we begin in the top left quadrant of the matrix, you are operating in the area where you are unconsciously incompetent. That is, you don’t know what you don’t know. You are unaware of your incompetence. You move out of this space when you cross the bridge of discovery. Somehow, you discover what you don’t know. At this point, you are still incompetent, but you are conscious of the fact that you are incompetent.
To move out of the conscious incompetence space, you must cross the bridge of training. In this phase, you are working hard to master the challenge. You must think about what you are doing, so you become consciously competent. Eventually, you cross the bridge of practice and you no longer have to think about the new skill because it has become a habit. You become unconsciously competent.
Let me use an example to explain what I mean. When my daughter turned 15, the State of Florida granted her a driver learner’s permit and turned her over to her parents, so we could teach her to drive. Up to this point, her only experience behind the wheel of a vehicle was at Disney World’s Indy Speedway. She was unaware of what she didn’t know about driving. She was operating out of the top left quadrant because she was unconsciously incompetent.
So, I took her to a parking lot where she could learn to drive a real car. When she hit the brakes for the first time, we both lunged forward and everything that had been sitting on the back seats was now on the floor. She discovered that driving a real car is nothing like driving the cars at Disney. She was conscious that she was incompetent.
As she practiced, every step required a conscious thought process. Before turning left, she had to think “flip the turn signal down” and before turning right, “flip the turn signal up.” It was a conscious process, but she was becoming competent at driving the car.
After a while, with a lot of practice, she could drive without thinking about each and every step. Heck, after years of practice, you and I can drive home from work with our thoughts totally in another place and before we know it, we are home. We are unconsciously competent drivers.
But beware, lest you think this is optimal. This is where we risk sliding down the slide of complacency. We become so confident, that we stop paying attention to the signs of how the world is changing around us. This is when we rely on our past success, whether or not it is what is needed to take us into the future. Complacency is being unconsciously incompetent.
Complacency is unconscious incompetence.This is what happened to the video rental companies, and mortgage companies, travel agencies and countless others who slid down the slide of complacency from the top of the world to bankruptcy. Do not be caught unaware!
The scripture readings at Mass over the past weeks have all been focused on the end of time. Like the participants in the real estate boom, we know that this good life can’t last forever. We all know the end is coming. The question is, will we “be vigilant at all times,” (Lk 21:36) and be ready?
Too often, business owners establish financial and legal documents to address what happens when one party exits the business, either by choice or by some unfortunate accident, but they fail to do an effective job of planning for business continuity. As a leader, if you don’t have an exit strategy and a succession plan you are executing, you’re not doing your job. You should always be developing your replacement, because the day will come when that person will need to step into your role.
This doesn’t just apply to a business owner. It applies to everyone. Although we cannot predict the future, and we may not know when exactly, we do know for certain that we are not going to be running our companies, working in the same job, or leading the same team of people forever. As an employee, you should always be developing yourself for the next role you want. Everything you do in this position should be done with the intent that it will help you get to the next one.
This is the central theme to this Sunday’s readings. “The days are coming,” (Jer 33:14) “There will be signs in the sun, the moon, and the stars,” (Lk 21:25) “when these signs begin to happen, stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.” (Lk 21:28) “Beware that your hearts do not become drowsy from carousing and drunkenness and the anxieties of daily life, and that day catch you by surprise like a trap.” (Lk 21:34) “Be blameless in holiness before our God and Father at the coming of our Lord Jesus with all his holy ones.” (1 Thes 3:13)
The end is coming. Whether it is the end of the world as we know it, or just our personal end, it is a certainty that it will happen. Don’t be complacent and go on as if you have all the time in the world to get things right. This Advent Season is a perfect time to cross the bridge of discovery, so you may become conscious about where you may have become complacent. Do a thorough examination of conscience and attend a penance service to receive the grace of God, through Jesus Christ, so that “you have the strength to escape the tribulations that are imminent. (Lk 21:36)
Invest in developing your prayer life, like you would invest in developing yourself for your next job. If you have a prayer routine, change it up, so that you consciously put effort into your relationship. If your prayer life could use a boost, make a commitment to spend daily time with the Lord. The Psalm beautifully summarizes the way.
Let us ask the Holy Spirit to guide us, teach us, and strengthen us in all we do as we await the coming of our Savior.
Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful, enkindle in them the fire of your love. Send forth your Spirit and they shall be created, and You shall renew the face of the earth.
May God bless you abundantly and may you glorify the Lord by your life. Amen
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Hi Lisa, Appreciate again the message today and as happens once a month or so, it brought back memories from the past. When I was in Bolivia back in 1991 or so, I went to a conference and we had a ‘four hour session’ on the topic of management and paradigms. Once of the videos we watched and it stayed with me over the years. I bought it, the video and three others done by Joel Barker so that I could work with my colleagues in the EXO shop in Cairo a few years later. Yep, the four videos or so, cost some $1,500. My financial controller told me, no…”How dare you by four videos for some $450 a piece!!” I said to him, you don’t understand, they are not videos,,,but they are an “Idea”. An idea I wanted to share with not only my section, but his too! Anyways, yes I did buy them and did share them as well. I even used them as a start to a two and a half hour lecture/discussion I did a the graduate school of Economics at Cairo Universtity. Anyways, I could go on, much more to this tidbit;). Thanks again.
John
Lisa is right on the mark. Complacency in the secular world as well as the spiritual world will eventually cause you problems. We must be ever alert to our changing world and the need to project ourselves forward; preparing ourselves for tomorrow. Daily prayer is one of the best ways we can prepare ourselves for the next moment, day, month, etc. We can never be lax in our attention to our spiritual life nor can be be lax in our secular life. Change is always happening and we must be ready.