What makes tiny improvements so powerful in business and personal growth? How can small changes lead to revolutionary results?
In The Diary of a CEO, Steven Bartlett reveals the transformative power of micro-innovation in business. His insights show how consistent, small improvements can create remarkable long-term success, while tiny oversights can accumulate into significant problems.
Keep reading to discover how micro-innovation can revolutionize your business strategy and personal journey.
Micro-Innovation
Businesses that conduct frequent experiments often reap the reward of huge groundbreaking innovations, but Bartlett also contends that innovations don’t have to be big and groundbreaking to radically improve your business. Rather, a multitude of tiny upgrades can achieve big results over time. For example, an online marketplace may run thousands of small A/B tests to determine the effect of subtle design changes on user behavior. Over time, this micro-innovation results in an irresistible website that gives the company a huge competitive advantage.
Bartlett insists that, if you build your company’s culture around continuous tiny upgrades, eventually you’ll have a world-class business.
Likewise, Bartlett asserts that ignoring small details has the opposite effect: If you ignore little problems, their consequences will add up over time and cause major damage to your business. For example, a software company that dismisses every minor bug and user complaint as trivial will alienate its user base over time as the product becomes increasingly unusable.
| Tiny Upgrades for Self-Improvement In Atomic Habits, James Clear contends that tiny upgrades are also the key to self-improvement. By focusing on repeating one small healthy action at a time, you can turn this action into a consistent habit that requires minimal conscious effort to maintain. This allows you to continue improving yourself without draining your motivation or willpower. While these tiny upgrades may seem insignificant at first, their impact grows massively as you consistently apply them. For example, if you eat a single serving of vegetables every day at lunch, this choice will become a habit, and it’ll be easier to start eating vegetables at breakfast and dinner, too. If you continue building these habits, you’ll eventually revolutionize your diet and feel much healthier. Likewise, tiny oversights can accumulate into negative habits that hinder your progress. Consistent unhelpful actions, like leaving a few dishes in the sink or procrastinating on a quick task, can spiral into larger problems: habits of avoidance that significantly impede your self-improvement efforts. |
Tiny Upgrades Are Motivating
Furthermore, micro-innovation serves as a powerful source of motivation for your team. Bartlett contends that, as long as your employees feel like they’re successfully moving toward a goal, they’ll be motivated to keep going, even if progress is slow.
(Shortform note: Other experts support this idea. According to John Doerr in Measure What Matters, research shows making progress can be more motivating for workers than receiving a bonus, receiving public recognition, or even achieving the goal itself.)
