The Risk of Doing Something Versus Nothing

The risk of doing something is greatly overestimated. The risk of doing nothing is greatly under estimated.

I think I may get this tattooed on my body.  This is the new guiding principal of my entrepreneurship journey.  It sounds so obvious and yet is so countervailing to so many businesses and executives. 

I often hear companies talk about “protecting their brand.” This is typically code for doing nothing or avoiding experimenting and pushing their comfortable boundaries. Brands who resisted advertising on Facebook, using social media, or doing content marketing used to say they were concerned about "protecting the brand."

This strikes me as just drifting in the pool.  Sure it's comfortable, but boy is it dangerous. You could quickly end up nowhere.

Comfortably drifting is not safer than taking risks because brands are in a continual state of decay. In fact, today, this rate of decay is faster than ever. I have two small children. Ask them what Disney does and the answer is simple: Frozen. No Beauty and the Beast, no Aladdin, no Mermaid. Disney never took past success for granted, each new franchise becomes the brand.

For my kids, the only brand they know for shopping is Amazon.  They look up stuff on Google and have never heard of Encyclopedia Britannica.  They know what Apple does and loves what it makes; in fact, they were shocked to learn that Steve Jobs made not only the iPad but also Finding Nemo (Pixar)!

They've never heard of Microsoft. They don't know what a Radio Shack is.

Life moves pretty fast, if you don't stop and look around once in a while, and take some risks, you could get crushed.

People on my team are often concerned about going client direct when an agency is unresponsive to us. They are concerned this will upset the agency. Given that the starting point is that the agency is unresponsive and the client is not yet working with us, seems to me there is relatively little downside. Even if the result is that agency is upset with us, a relatively rare occurrence, seems to me that this is better than where we were. In fact the typical outcome is that the client gets interested, introduces us to their agency, and we get going!

When I think about new initiatives or projects, I feel a little like a venture capitalists. Of 10 initiatives, 5 will go nowhere, 3 will be OK, and 2 will be hits that move the revenue and client satisfaction needles. The cost of the 5 losers is pretty modest.

• The risk of doing something is some success and some things that were a waste of time.
• The risk for a business of doing nothing in a competitive environment is decay leading to death.  There is no safety in avoiding risk. 

This is no more more apparent than the rapid decline in Blackberry that was doing well with the core business and scoffed at new innovations (the risk of doing something) till it was too late.

Be Ferris Bueller.  Not Ben from The Graduate.