Making waves

At our last board meeting, our chairman looked at one of our graphs and asked when we launched our Mastery Programme. We said it was three years ago, and he congratulated us on having achieving nearly 50% of our revenue with a product that didn’t exist 3 years ago. It is particularly gratifying is that our revenue was up nearly 30% last year and we had a record profit.But while that’s good, it’s not the whole story, or even the most relevant part of the story.I always think that in business it’s less about what you are and more about what you are becoming. Mastery is now a Horizon 2 product that we continue to develop and promote. It’s one of our Most Important Goals (MIGs). But one of the other MIGs refers to Horizon 3 – what are we working on now that will be as successful Mastery in 3 years’ time?These are the waves of development, growth and maturity that we all have to manage if we are to stay relevant to our market. Your wave cycle might be longer or shorter, but you have one too, unless your market is immune to change.The most gratifying part of Mastery’s success and the progress in our new product pipeline is that we are doing pretty well at the biggest business challenge of all: running today’s business while creating tomorrow’s.