Page 21 - Benjamin Franklin\'s The Way to Wealth: A 52 brilliant ideas interpretation - PDFDrive.com

6 SLUGS, SPEEDSTERS AND DEAD SHARKS

‘Laziness travels so slowly,’ observed Franklin, ‘that poverty soon
overtakes him.’ The obvious modern interpretation of this is that anyone
who takes their foot off the pedal and slacks off is eventually going to
find financial worries snapping at their heels.

DEFINING IDEA…
The fact that I have entered into IT-related business is proof that
businesses have to evolve and keep with time. One has to re-invent
continuously.
~ KERY PACKER, NORMALLY PERCEIVED AS A CRICKET PROMOTER

Fair enough, and as true today as it was back in 1758, but the march of
time has added another dimension to Franklin’s wisdom. Woody Allen
famously declared that ‘A relationship, I think, is like a shark, you know? It
has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our
hands is a dead shark.’ Replace the word ‘relationship’ with the word
‘business’…

Physical laziness is easy to recognise, but intellectual laziness tends to be
harder to spot and much easier to disguise with rationalisations. With the
rapid pace and constant evolution of today’s business landscape, simply
working hard is not enough to guarantee success. The truly successful are
also constantly scanning the horizon for new opportunities and threats.

Established back in 1873, Barnes and Noble was the giant of the American
bookselling industry with over 800 shops by the 1990s. The company could
quite reasonably claim to be the barons of bookselling. But a quick-witted
entrepreneur called Jeff Bezos had already latched on to the potential that
this new-fangled World Wide Web thingy offered for remote sales, and
while he professed no knowledge of the book trade he chose books as a
good starting point for a new company selling online. The result was that
the barons of bookselling suddenly found themselves under attack from an
unexpected upstart. The ‘Amazon effect’, in which a new competitor