By: Omar Alhaza’a – Founder & CEO of Franchise Arabia

A circus keeps a baby elephant from running away by chaining it to a wooden stake. when the elephant pulls at the chain, the cuff chafes its leg, and the poor animal concludes that to avoid pain it had best stay put.

But when the elephant grows up the circus still chains it to the same small stake. The mature elephant, with his immense weight, could easily now pull the stake out of the ground like a toothpick, but the elephant remembers the pain, and is too dumb to use the new set of “facts” to make the necessary “change”.

The tiny wooden stake keeps a two-ton elephant at bay just as effectively as it did the baby in the past.

Unfortunately, many local Brand leaders are a little bit like the circus elephant: too dependent on “old facts”, and still basing new decisions on what worked twenty-five years ago. 

They still chained with their own shackles of old believes that keep them from growing their business and making significant changes.  They are like trying to drive forward by watching the rear-view mirror.

For a Brand to grow, change needs to flow. It’s what keeps your Brand from losing the mind-space you occupy in your client’s head.

Building a Brand is a constant process of staying current, of perceiving how new realities and information can alter old decisions, of anticipating the future. It’s about getting out of being trapped by a “fixed mindset”.

You should know better than to fall into the same mental trap as an elephant with a chain around its leg!