In the last few years, we’ve seen incredible evolutions. As I belong to a pre-internet generation the technical evolution still comes with a lot of awe. Reminders of how much my daily activities but also the way I deal with them has changed regularly pop up for example when picking up the phone. The one we call smart.

Its impact is much bigger than individual activities. It involves just as much the way we perceive our business activities.

To prepare some work based on organizational role analysis I was going back to “Coaching in depth” a book edited in 2006. There, in a case description, Gordon Lawrence describes the business he was consulting to as having “no sense that it could be highly profitable. It was a small to medium-sized company by definition”.

It’s a description that sounds reasonable to me.

At the same time, it doesn’t resemble the attitude many small startups have. The more they include the idea of scale into their thinking, the bigger the dreams. But also the higher the expectations.

It’s just a few years, but success now seems to have a very different outlook than it did then. It’s making me wonder if success can be perceived as worthwhile when it less than exponential.

It’s probably reserved for just a few.

Not many more than today.

It may be worth revisiting the notion of success.