“There are risks and costs to a program of action. But they are far less than the long-range risks and costs of comfortable inaction.” U. S. President John F Kennedy.
If you don’t quite recall, President Kennedy took a huge long-range risk at great cost to send astronauts to the moon—and back. The Apollo program cost billions in 1960’s dollars, and millions of (mostly) man-hours (ref the movie about the computers), and several brave pioneers lost their lives in the testing before the moon-shot mission.
Two great movies can to fill you in and get you in an adventurous mood: Hidden Figures and Apollo 13. The success of the moon shots depended on the “computers”—the name for the data analysts who computed with slide rules. And the skilled pilots-the astronauts who flew Apollo 13 back.
I remember that time well, because I grew up, not quite in the shadow of NASA, but within commuting distance of Huntsville, Alabama. Houston and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida are more famous, but Huntsville was the cradle of the space industry. It is still a center of high-tech innovation and creation in the space industry. It is also home to the US Army Base, the Redstone Arsenal, where the Marshall Space Flight Center is located. My grandmother even worked at Redstone during WWII, in a kind of Rosie the Riveter manufacturing role while the guys were at the front.
There’s a great museum there, where you can go “weightless”!
That’s probably as close as most of will get to a moon shot.
But within our own businesses, there are plenty of chances to think too hard about too small a target, and not enough about taking a bigger risk.
Let’s take a look at the risks and costs of either path in more detail.
Take Action! Set Sail.
There you go…setting goals and targets, but often holding yourself to smaller steps than you’d really like to accomplish. Even once you have your plan established, there are so many ways it can go wrong, both anticipated and unexpected.
The number one reason projects fail is failure to start. I read that in an HBR article decades ago. It really stuck. So, start.
What could go wrong?
But what if you don’t rock the boat?
Kennedy warned against the long-range costs and risks of comfortable inaction. Here are a few.
We are still discovering the reality and opportunities of space exploration. You are reading this through technology developed in that exploration. The internet, satellite phones, GPS, precision missile targeting, should you need it—all arose from risks taken and costs incurred decades ago.
The current US political situation reflects this lack of shared experiences, or rather, of over-emphasizing our differences rather than looking for common ground.
And those people! We are such a problem. Fear is a fundamental stopper of initiative. What could go wrong here?
If you’ve ever been through a merger/acquisition, you’ve seen this. Systems (software, processes, relationships) don’t merge easily either.
When you don't challenge yourself, you may start to doubt whether you're capable of achieving your goals. This loss of confidence can make you less resilient when faced with adversity. Isolation is stagnating. The” re-entry” from COVID isolation has been more difficult that many of us expected.
All these personal challenges—resistance, regret, pride, loss of confidence, isolation—make it harder to cope with setbacks and bounce back from failures.
These are fearsome risks. It’s enough to make you cut the throttle and rock along on the comfortable course you’ve set. But that is short-term thinking. Even if you’re working on a new program, you may be aiming too low.
We take risks and incur costs for a reward. Often it’s not the reward we expected. Sometimes it less than that. But sometimes the reward is, as they say, beyond our wildest dreams.
Humans got to earthly orbit. We got to the moon. We flew past Mars, and Saturn. Now Voyager is 15 billion miles from Earth, exploring even farther. And just recently, NASA engineers repaired the 46-year-old computers across that vast distance.
And many businesses and jobs and new ideas have resulted.
What big vision do you have for your business? Are you working on that, even part of the time, while you manage operations and sales and cash flow?
What about adding a new strategy, and shooting for the stars?
Lorette Pruden has helped hundreds of small business owners, sales professionals, entrepreneurs, and community leaders grow their businesses and manage that growth since 2000. She specializes in the Formerly Corporate—so many small business owners who’ve worked with her come from a corporate background that she finally wrote the book on it.
