In Jemima Khan’s wonderful film What’s Love Got To Do With It? this question is asked to someone who decides to end a casual relationship which turned out to be a poor fit.  

Let’s apply that same question to business.

What happens if you aim high and dismiss thoughts of missing? When I first met the late, great Lord Noon about 35 years ago he told me how he started his ready-made meal empire which eventually valued him at over £100m, I thought everyone needed to hear how it happened and so I wrote a big profile on him for The Sunday Times. He’d arrived in Britain from Bombay in the late 1980s and watched with curiosity the public’s obsession with Indian restaurants and clocked two things: having a curry would soon no longer necessarily mean a night out and people would be eating as much of it in their homes.

He surveyed the supermarket offerings in the chilled and frozen sections and found them way below restaurant standards, so he got himself in front of Sainsbury’s, Bird’s Eye and Waitrose and showed them the curries that they were currently selling their customers and his version of the same dishes. The response he received from all three was identical: “Yes of course your dishes are higher quality but try making them in a factory”.

He stunned them all with his reply: “I did.”

In turn, they each asked: “Whose factory?”

“Mine!”

“Why do you have a factory when you say you haven’t started trading yet?”

“Because I am going to win your business”.

And he did – all three signed him up.

Today, for businesses that are driving their profits by tackling the problems we face all around us like the destruction of our planet and rising social inequality, aiming low is not going to deliver a safer, fairer world. Just think Patagonia.

When Paul Polman, the poster boy for responsible business, became chief executive of Unilever in 2009, he set out his stall by saying be would double the sales of the company whilst simultaneously having its carbon footprint which sceptics struggled to believe possible, but he nonetheless achieved this ahead of the deadline he’d set himself.

So going back to the question that we started with, perhaps the answer is this: Maybe – unless we aim high, we’re all going to hurt.