Think Bigger To Your Next Breakthrough

Breakthroughs are often seen as the result of small iterations, consistent effort, and little steps forward.

After-all, it’s usually hard, time consuming and maybe even expensive, to fight the status quo of your company culture to change and/or deal with existing market conditions and/or challenges that come up every day. 

Sometimes small, iterative changes may not be the most effective approach to employ in a situation because incremental changes aren’t typically the foundation to the best results and the biggest breakthroughs. In fact, it can sometimes be the exact opposite that will transform your results. 

Richard Branson has flooded the news lately with his trip to space on Virgin Galactic. But this is a story from his early flying days as the founder of Virgin Atlantic. If you’ve read his book, Finding my Virginity, you know this story. Back in the 1990s, Virgin Atlantic was trying to raise 10M pounds to install individual seat-back screens in all of their planes. It was a small, but meaningful upgrade as Virgin wanted their fleet to have the most modern entertainment. 

But it was the middle of a recession and finding the money was proving to be next to impossible. There were a couple paths forward I would imagine. They could have waited until the market improved. They could have sought out less capital to retrofit fewer planes. They could have scrapped the idea entirely. Rather, Branson and Virgin stepped away from the idea of small steps to thinking much, much bigger. 

As he tells the story in his book, Branson picked up the phone and called the Boeing CEO, Phil Conduit. He offered to buy 10 brand new 747-400s, but only if they would throw in seat-back video equipment in economy class. Amazed that anyone was buying planes in a recession, the CEO of Boeing agreed. Branson then did the same thing with Airbus. Thinking bigger was working. A few calls later, Branson comparatively easily was able to raise 4 billion pounds on credit to buy an entirely new airplane fleet, replete with the latest entertainment screens behind every seat. 

Virgin would sign on the dotted line for the best deal on new planes the company had ever purchased. The 10M pounds wasn’t working out, but the 4B pounds did. Branson ended up finding 400 times more money for the new planes vs retrofitting a new entertainment system on the old ones.

Thinking bigger (not smaller) was the key to this breakthrough. 

What’s your goal, vision or aspiration?

Whatever it is, what would it look like if you made it bigger?

Much bigger? Even 400 times bigger?

Tell me HERE and I’ll share with you some helpful steps along the way.

I’m all for small steps forward, little iterations and progress however small. But I find that the natural inclination of most people and companies is to think smaller, dial back and be cautious.

Ironically, it turns out that dialing it back can make things harder and leave you with a lot of competition because just about everyone does it. Thinking bigger separates you from the pack where there’s little competition and a better chance to win. Let’s take a page out of Branson’s story, and think bigger to our next breakthrough.