The Moment You Stop Growing, You Start Dying

Whenever I encourage people to attend my seminars on personal development, leadership training, NLP or financial mastery, there will always be some people who tell me, ” I don’t need to change. I am happy with where I am. I am comfortable. I already know everything”.

While I respect their decision, I cannot help but fear for their future. I know for a fact that when someone has a mindset of not wanting to constantly learn and improve, their job, income, business and happiness will soon be taken away.

We live in times where the world is changing so fast. The moment you stop growing, you start dying. The moment you stop climbing, you start sliding. It is impossible to maintain the status quo. The only constant is change itself!

In my company, my CEO and I constantly push our colleagues to aim for constant growth and to keep innovating newer and better strategies. To enter new markets and reach more people. Some staff have asked me, “we are already the market leader, why are you still pushing for us to grow even more? Why can’t you be satisfied? Again, I know the moment my company stops growing, it will start dying and be replaced by competitors who are faster and hungrier.

The Demise of Nokia: “We Didn’t Do Anything Wrong”- Nokia’s CEO

One of the most powerful lessons to learn is from the demise of Nokia. Recently, after falling by 99% in market value, Nokia was bought by Microsoft. During the press conference to announce Nokia being acquired by Microsoft, the Nokia CEO ended his speech saying this “we didn’t do anything wrong, but somehow, we lost”. Upon saying that, all his management team, himself included, teared sadly.

In the beginning 1990-2012…

Nokia was one of the largest company in a world . It was the world’s largest mobile phone manufacturer
with 80% Market Share. The company’s share price was $42 and was worth  €250 billion. Nokia was a respectable company with good managers who did their jobs well. Unfortunately, doing a good job and maintaining the status quo is not good enough today.

Nokia’s leaders did not learn, innovate and change fast enough. They were unable to foresee the rapid changes in the mobile phone industry brought about by Apple and Samsung, 2 companies that did not even sell phones a few years ago. Apple and Samsung were much faster in learning and changing with the new trend.

Very quickly, iPhone and Galaxy starting overtaking Nokia in mobile phone sales. From 2011 -2013, Nokia fell from #1 to #10 in smartphone sales. Their market share fell from 80% to less than 3%.
Their  share price falls from $42.50 to $2.50 and thousands of hardworking employees lost their livelihood. By  2013,  Nokia’s market value had fallen 99% from €250 billion to  €3.79 billion.

The Lesson?

Nokia didn’t do anything wrong in their business, however, the world changed too fast. Their opponents changed too fast. They missed out on learning, changing, and thus they not only lost the opportunity to succeed, they lost their chance of survival.

If you too don’t change fast enough, you shall be removed by the competition.If your thoughts and mindset cannot catch up with times, you will be eliminated. Those who refuse to learn & improve, will definitely one day become redundant & not relevant to the industry. They will learn the lesson in a hard & expensive way.

Another Lesson from Disney? 

Laid-off Disney worker forced to train the foreign worker who replaced him

Another very sad story I read recently was that of a Disney IT employee who was told shortly before the holiday season that he was being replaced by a foreign worker despite his excellent work review. He was also told that he would have to train his replacement to receive his severance pay.

He broke down as he described the moment he had to tell his children they could not buy Halloween pumpkins because he was losing his job. Did Disney have to retrench him because they were losing money? No. Disney just announced record sales and profits. They retrenched him because they could hire someone cheaper, faster… leading to more profits for shareholders.

While it is terrible what Disney did and we can choose to blame these rich greedy corporations all we want, the important lesson we need to learn is to ensure this NEVER happens to us. Whether we are entrepreneurs or employees, we need to constantly learn, unlearn, relearn. We need to constantly grow and change with the times so NOBODY can replace us with someone cheaper and faster!

Instead of choosing to be the victim and blaming government, corporations and foreign labour for taking away our jobs, we need to choose to take responsibility as a leader to ensure we never become redundant and obsolete.