This week, I had the opportunity to meet a NASA astronaut, Don Thomas, and hear his story at a Florida SCC event.
What stayed with me wasn’t simply the accomplishment of becoming an astronaut. It was the perseverance required to get there. The setbacks. The obstacles. The times when the easier answer would have been to accept that something wasn’t going to happen.
He didn’t. Four times.
That got me thinking about the fuel behind perseverance, and how much it matters in business.
Most businesses have ambitious destinations. Grow faster. Improve margins. Win a major customer. Launch a new product. Transform a manufacturing operation. Double EBITDA. Complete an acquisition. Prepare for an exit.
Those are our Mars missions.
But ambition doesn’t get you there. You need the right rocket fuel.
Perseverance Is a Business Capability
I don’t think perseverance is simply about working harder or refusing to quit.
It’s the human instinct to believe we can do something better than we’re doing it today, and then having the discipline to keep working at it.
You see it everywhere in high-performing organizations.
In sales, perseverance is making the next call after losing an opportunity you thought you were going to win. It’s asking why you lost. Improving the value proposition. Refining the approach. Going back into the market and trying again.
In operations, perseverance is continuous improvement. It’s refusing to accept that today’s yield, OEE, scrap rate, lead time or schedule attainment is simply “how the plant runs.” You solve one constraint, expose the next one and go after that.
In innovation, perseverance is learning from the formulation that didn’t work, the stability failure or the launch that missed the mark. The failure isn’t wasted if it makes the next iteration better.
In leadership, perseverance is staying with the transformation after the excitement of the kickoff meeting is gone. It’s continuing to review the metrics, challenge the organization, learn with your team and remove barriers week after week.
None of those actions are particularly glamorous.
But neither is most of the work required to get to Mars.
What Is Your Rocket Fuel?
The businesses I’ve seen create the most value aren’t necessarily the ones with the boldest strategy decks. They’re the ones with people who keep asking:
How can we do this better?
And then actually do something about the answer.
That mindset compounds. A slightly better sales process. A little more throughput. Less scrap. Better working capital. Faster innovation. Stronger customer retention. Better decisions.
One improvement rarely transforms a company.
Hundreds of them can.
So perhaps the question isn’t simply, “Where are we trying to go?”
It’s also:
Do we have the right fuel to keep going when getting there becomes difficult?
If you’re serious about going to Mars, ambition alone may not get you there. At Mangrove Performance Group, we work alongside leadership teams to turn ambition into measurable commercial, operational and financial performance. If your business has an ambitious destination, let’s make sure you have the right fuel to reach it.