Inertia: Your Biggest Challenge In Growing Your Business

Inertia is the resistance of any physical object to any change in its position and state of motion. This includes changes to the object's speed, direction, or state of rest.

Your business is a physical object, subject to the laws of the physical universe.

Inertia is also defined as the tendency of objects to keep moving in a straight line at a constant velocity. The principle of inertia is one of the fundamental principles in classical physics that are still used to describe the motion of objects and how they are affected by the applied forces on them.

Are your sales sluggish? Does your brand seem idle in leveraging modern marketing technology, platforms, and opportunities? Are you moving in the same direction when your statistics indicate a need for a change in direction or speed of expansion?

If so, you are suffering from inertia.

The enemy of most large companies is “the way it’s always been.” Companies that are held back by inertia are destined to have their lunch eaten by faster, hungrier competitors.
Fast Company 

Most Business Professionals Resist Growth, Change 

While many business professionals are in a state of inertia when it comes to growth. 

Resistance to change, at Board and executive levels, retards growth and sends customers and employees looking elsewhere for new, brighter opportunities.

Another common trait of corporate inertia and adherence to routine ways of operating is a reluctance to invest in product development and new business ventures. New buildings, product research, diversification and technology infrastructure are among common business investments that forward-thinking companies make. Those suffering from rigidity and inertia may delay investments in these items or wait until it is too late to take advantage of a window of opportunity. At the extreme, companies give up opportunities in emerging markets to competitors and fall behind in the race for capital.

The problem is not an inability to take action but an inability to take appropriate action. There can be many reasons for the problem—ranging from managerial stubbornness to sheer incompetence—but one of the most common is a condition that I call active inertia. Inertia is usually associated with inaction—picture a billiard ball at rest on a table—but physicists also use the term to describe a moving object’s tendency to persist in its current trajectory. Active inertia is an organization’s tendency to follow established patterns of behavior—even in response to dramatic environmental shifts. Stuck in the modes of thinking and working that brought success in the past, market leaders simply accelerate all their tried-and-true activities. In trying to dig themselves out of a hole, they just deepen it.
Harvard Business Review