Transform Your Business Blog

For most web developers, CGI stands for Common Gateway Interface. It’s a way to deliver dynamic content, usually using the Perl programming language.

But I’ve decided to rebrand CGI - as Change, Grow and Innovate. Those are the three concepts behind what we do, and the reasons why we even started out as a company. I could easily go back to the jobs I used to do (except for that company that went under), but I’d rather challenge myself to change, grow and innovate with my own business.

Here are some quotes on each topic that I’ve enjoyed:

Change

“It is not necessary to change. Survival is not mandatory.”
- W. Edwards Deming

“If you want to truly understand something, try to change it.”
- Kurt Lewin

“If nothing ever changed, there would be no butterflies.”
- Anonymous

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
- Margaret Mead

Growth

“There came a time when the risk to remain tight in the bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
- Anais Nin

“Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people do that.”
- Mark Twain

“I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.”
- Pablo Picasso

Innovation

“If you have always done it that way, it is probably wrong.”
- Charles Kettering

“He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils; for time is the greatest innovator.”
- Sir Francis Bacon, “On Innovation”

“If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said a faster horse.”
- Henry Ford

Seth Godin has given us a (perhaps all-too familiar) list of excuses entitled, “Top ways to defend the status quo.” We can read them and laugh a bit to ourselves, but they’re still painful to hear in real-life meetings, coming from the voices of real-life members of a firm’s ‘leadership’ team. Amongst the excuses:

• That will never work.
• Well, this might work for other people, but I think we’ll stick with what we’ve got.
• Well, if you had some real-world experience, then you would understand.

Check out the original post for the rest of the list. Hats off to the Canning Collaborative Learning Commons for bringing this to my attention.

A few I’d like to add to the original list:

• We’re waiting for the next big thing
• We’ll need to see that in a Power Point
• I like the idea, but I don’t think we have time to implement it