How do we grow our business while simultaneously ensuring our values remain untarnished?
It’s a question every entrepreneur has asked themselves, most often in cases where they feel pressured to choose one or the other.
In these desperate times, too many react like a kid in a sandpit trying to claim territory as their own: they draw a line.
Drawing a line in the sand does not work.
The path to anything that matters in life is never linear. It twists and turns. It seeks solutions rather than charging obstinately into what it does not care to understand.
And if you ever found yourself in a sandpit like the one I described, you know that drawing a line is an invitation for others to cross it. When that happens, everybody loses.
We must learn judgement, and to pick our battles. We must learn how to be flexible, allow ourselves room to manoeuvre, and time to consider.
For as Ch’en Hao, one of the Great Commentators of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War wrote, “to be on desperate ground is like sitting in a leaking boat or crouching in a burning house”.
If we can not adapt, we perish.