Is your business too comfortable? A little tension will get you out of your 'comfort coma'

Ali Saadat of FedBid

What kind of person are you? Are you comfortable being comfortable, or does comfort make you uncomfortable? I am in the latter category.  I prefer running in the heat of the day in the summer and in the icy cold of the morning in the winter.  I take the stairs.  I use a standing desk. I will manually dial important phone numbers, even if they are stored in my phone.  I guess the reason for this is that I feel that, by injecting a little bit of discomfort doing the things I would do anyway, I’ll get tougher; I’ll have greater resiliency when things invariably don’t go as planned.  As one of my football coaches said when we were practicing in the cold, driving rain at the Naval Academy: “If you’re going to work in the North Atlantic, you’ve got to train in the North Atlantic.”  This applies to our businesses, too. It’s my observation that the businesses that embrace discomfort have better growth than the ones that have slipped into what I call a “comfort coma.”

How do you know if your company is too comfortable, what are the downsides, and how do you fix it?  Read the rest at the Washington Business Journal.