I’ve taken the title of this post from “Abundance – the future is better than you think”, a book by Peter H Diamandis and Steven Kotler. In full this bit is:

“In many cases we know where we want to go but not how to get there. In others, we know how to get there but want to get there faster.”

It’s from a chapter on driving innovations and breakthroughs. And, to be brutally honest, any business that isn’t where it wants to go/ be needs innovation to help get it there.

Often the kick start for the breakthrough will be something that is or is perceived as a disaster:

• The loss of a major client/ customer
• An important sale that all your hopes were riding on doesn’t happen
• Your prime competitor comes up with a product or service that out-produces and undercuts yours…

Add your own as, let’s face it, the list is potentially endless. So the key is going to be how you decide to approach and handle this setback, this time. If you run your own business that’s currently facing this situation and can come up with the right sort of innovation, you’ll do it yourself. The tricky bit can be seeing the wood from the trees and working out just what the right sort of innovation would be…

The smart money is on take a few deep, calming breaths and thenget help, and get it fast because you’re probably up against it now! There are books, audios, seminars, workshops, webinars – in fact endless sources of easily accessible self help nowadays. But if your focus has been totally or almost completely in your business up until now and this self help area is new to you then you may find yourself picking your way through rather a lot of trees…

My advice?

The most direct route would be to get yourself a mentor. Who do you know who has built up a successful business – recently – because ways of doing business are changing rapidly and what worked ten years ago might not today, and what worked twenty years ago is probably even less likely to be effective now. Failing that, who do you know who is personally successful, who you could learn attitudes and approaches from? Getting any necessary additional skills are the easy bit, provided you’re prepared to put in the effort to learn and apply them until they become habit.

Do yourself a favour and check you’re still on the right course before you go haring off anywhere!