“It’s Just Not the Right Time”

Published 28 September 2026

I can lose an hour in Waterstones without noticing. It’s one of the few kinds of shopping I actively enjoy, so much so that I’ve always told my daughters I’ll buy them a book, any book, no argument. My eldest, a bookworm studying English Literature, has made full use of that over the years.

Part of what I like is that you go in looking for one thing and come out with something else. Or with nothing in mind at all, and three books anyway.

Borders understood that. It built large stores, carried an enormous range and made places where people could browse and discover. It was very good at being a bookseller.

Then the definition of a good bookseller started to change. Borders had a decision to make, and it made a reasonable one, for reasons that made complete sense at the time. Then it kept finding perfectly good reasons why the rest could wait.

Customers still wanted books. No one had suddenly decided that books were no longer useful. (There will always be a market for them as long as my daughter and I are alive).

But increasingly, they wanted to be able to find almost any book, compare prices and reviews, check availability, order it from home and have it delivered.

The product hadn’t changed. But the specification had.

And that’s an important distinction for businesses.

Because sometimes a business can be doing a very good job and still be solving the wrong version of the problem.

What changed is what customers now expect around the product. And that change can be surprisingly easy to put off.

Borders didn’t ignore the internet. It had an online business. But in 2001, after several years of losses, it chose to outsource its online operation to Amazon. Amazon would handle much of the online retail operation, including fulfilment and customer service.

At the time, there was a perfectly understandable logic to that decision.

Borders knew how to run bookshops. Amazon knew how to run an online retail operation.

Why spend time, money and management attention building something that somebody else could do for you?

The problem is the thing you’ve decided can wait doesn’t necessarily stay still while you deal with everything else.

Which is where resistance to change often looks very different from how we imagine it. It rarely sounds like, “We’re not changing”. Instead, “Now isn’t the right time” or “Let’s get through this first” seem perfectly reasonable excuses for postponing a change.

The problem is when they become the reason for doing nothing, repeatedly.

Borders did eventually decide. In 2007 it ended the Amazon arrangement and set about running its own site again, which it relaunched the following year.

So, the decision was made. It just took six years.

And it still took another two before there was an ebook store, by which time Amazon had been selling Kindles since 2007.

Borders continued to operate physical stores for years. It continued to develop. It made attempts to increase its online offering.

But by then the problem was much bigger

It would be too simple to say that one decision caused Borders to fail. It didn’t.

There were other pressures, including the cost of its store network, and the financial constraints the business was under.

But the story illustrates something important.

Because sometimes the danger isn’t that you don’t see the change. It’s that you keep finding good reasons why you don’t need to deal with it yet.

And eventually, “yet” becomes too late.

There’s something in your business you’ve decided can wait. How long has it been waiting?