I’m a firm believer that wisdom can be found anywhere, and I recently made a new discovery while walking my dog. As the primary dog walker, I tend to take us around three basic routes. The first is a quick around the block, a 10-minute route where he can sniff and do his business and I don’t have to invest a ton of time into a longer walk. The second option is a path that’s about a mile in total and goes around a park where he can enjoy sniffing the trees.
He’s happy with either of these options, but sometimes I choose a third option. Funnily enough, this third option starts off the same as the first two, but at a certain point he realizes that we’re going on a longer walk and he starts to fight me on it to try and get me to turn around and head for home. Once he gets over that and accepts that we’re doing a longer walk, though, he continues along as normal and has no problem finishing the walk.
The through line with all three of these routes is that he’s happy enough to go along once he knows which route we’re on. He also knows that we prefer sidewalks, so although we may be in the middle of a crosswalk, he lunges for the sidewalk on the opposite end of the street. Even when that almost got the both of us hit by a bus.
My point being that my dog is able to recognize patterns and knows that two paths are comfortable and one path pushes him. Generally, he will express a preference for one of the easier walks. More than that, he knows how to recognize and set out a path for sidewalks, even if that’s not where we should go.
This is a dog that will knock you over the second he thinks he can go for a walk, then drag you back home the second he thinks the walk is over. Believe it or not, this isn’t just one long ad for your local dog shelter. It occurred to me last week, when he made a very good attempt at tripping me, that this isn’t too dissimilar from work patterns.
In business, it’s normal to have certain established patterns. You probably know what the start of the day or week or even month is supposed to look like. And at work, we tend to have a few different modes of operating. We can make the light and easy choice; go for a middle-of-the-road, manageable route; or push through with the hard choice and maybe accomplish something significant.
The most common option is to pick one of the two easier routes. And even when you make the hard decision and pick the more difficult path, there are still pitfalls to watch out for. Because when you’re pushing yourself, a lot of the times you’ll spy the sidewalk on the other side of the street, and making a break for that familiar route could put you directly in front of an oncoming city bus.
Even with these risks, though, it’s more often than not worth it to push yourself to take the more challenging path. Very little growth is going to happen on a quick, 10-minute walk around the block. You can enjoy stability on the normal, medium walk, but accomplishment only comes with the long walk and the prospect of doing something difficult.
When you’re in the middle of doing something hard, it can be tempting to look back and think, “Man, I could sprint for home and be done with this hard thing.” But unless you push through it, you can’t enjoy the rewards of doing something strenuous, the breaking of patterns, the discovery of a different path.
If you are the boss, or in a leadership role, you have to be the one to balance the normal with the need to achieve. You have to be the one to decide whether your team needs the easy week or can make the leap to the big idea. One could argue that “making others do the hard” is easier than pushing yourself. But good managing is not always pushing; it is balancing for maximum output. Whether this is you doing you, or you running a Fortune 500 company, the rule applies.
While the calendar doesn’t mark today as National Take Your Pet to Work Day, I hope that you’ll take this as a reminder that that easy doesn’t necessarily mean good, and it certainly doesn’t mean growth. So go out, get lost, and don’t turn for home when things start to get scary.
There is always a pile of books on management and entrepreneurship to choose from, and although I don’t find grand revelations in every book I pick up, I do like the search. Recently I discovered a new book, and what has stuck with me is the author’s description of catastrophic thinking, or catastrophizing.
The author presented this as a pattern that he noticed in himself. As he explained it, he had recently started a new enterprise and it was moving along in fits and starts, as a new business is wont to do. And he noticed that at every downturn or bad week, he found himself projecting one negative event to the nth degree.
“Okay, I got half as many orders as I normally do. That means I’m not going to be able to cover some bills — what if it happens again? I won’t be able to pay this month’s rent!” By the end of this thought exercise, he was living on the streets and had lost the majority of his teeth.
The author’s assertion was that moments like these are a lesson for entrepreneurs to know when to get out of their own way, because that thinking doesn’t stop at logical points. It spirals indefinitely until you’ve convinced yourself that you’re in some dark, awful pit with no means of egress.
I’d like to think that I am not the only person who saw themselves reflected in the author’s panic and “what if” response. In business, emotional swings are to be expected. When you run your own business, whether it’s a growing startup or a plateaued mature business, you’re simply going to have to ride the emotional rollercoaster.
As I considered the familiarity of this pattern, though, I developed a question. If it’s easy for owners to ride the emotional rollercoaster down, why can’t we ride it back up to the top? The fantasy of slipping ever downward is a compelling one, but if we’re really going to consider this as a rollercoaster, then you should be able to use that downward force to ride back up the other side to new heights.
When you’re riding the rollercoaster down, you’re projecting a fantasy of scarcity. “What if I don’t sell as much as I need to? What if I come in under the line?” While this fear is certainly compelling, that doesn’t change its unreal nature. So if we’re going to indulge ourselves in fantasies anyway, why not make them ones of abundance? “What if I sell an extra ten units? How would I handle it if I sold a hundred more, how would I manage that kind of rampant growth?”
In response to that question, I would point out that there are more than a few books that give guidance on how to scale up your business. Which can lead to interesting hypotheticals and planning scenarios, although the advice is somewhat limited by the refrain of, “Just ask somebody to loan you $100 million so you can afford to annually lose $10 million for 10 years.” While I have no doubt that that plan of attack is effective, it’s not something that most people can even conceive of, let alone enact.
If you’re an average human being without access to near-limitless capital and looking to advance your business, I’d recommend that you invest the time planning for your business’ success instead of dreading its downfall. Take some time and paint the picture of what a little more success looks like, and then a lot more.
From there, start backing into scenarios like, “Well if I did this and got 1, how could I do that again and get 2? What behaviors got me there, what did I do that generated success, and how do I do it again, and bigger?”
There will always be strong positive and negative emotions that come with owning and operating a business. But just like you ride the rollercoaster down with alarming speed, you can use that same energy to propel yourself upward and create a vision of where you’d like your business to be. Once you can see it, you’ll be able to start taking concrete steps to make that goal a reality.
I was recently having dinner with my wife at a high-end ramen restaurant, and it struck me how much my life had changed. Back in college, I, like many others, lived off of $5/1 packets of ramen. While I’ve since learned that I need to live off more than sodium and starch, the lesson that night came when I inquired about the eating utensils at the restaurant.
For the record, I know how to use chopsticks. What I’ve never understood, though, was the function of the deep, Chinese-style spoon that they give you (I’d later learn that it’s called a renge). Determined to finally have an answer to one of life’s eternal questions, I asked the waiter if he could explain how I was meant to use this unfamiliar tool.
After a quick lesson and demonstration, for which my wife and I were extremely grateful, we felt confident using our respective renges. It definitely enhanced the meal, and it was more enjoyable knowing that we were eating the ramen as intended, with effective but non-offensive slurping. In other words, we felt equipped with the right tools for the job.
And so it goes in business — and life — today. Just like you wouldn't try to eat ramen with a fork, you can’t navigate the increasingly chaotic world of politics, technology, and business with outdated or inadequate tools.
As columnists, people like me love to take a few minutes at the beginning or end of the year and share our forecasts on what’s coming up in the new year. As I do this, I’m reflecting on where we are right now. As I write, France’s elected officials have chosen to dissolve the current government, where the two extremes came together to oust the middle.
To me, this echoes the chaos that we saw in the U.S. House of Representatives when Kevin McCarthy was ousted without a clear path forward. In the next four years, I think we’re likely to see a lot of that kind of sudden, abrupt upheaval in the political world — disruption is not a byproduct or a possibility, but the clear, stated intent of the new power in Washington.
We can all hope that whatever new solutions get developed work, but as we see similar movements gaining ground in Germany, a likely shift in Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and big changes in the Middle East power structure. One could call this a “rapidly changing landscape.”
This isn’t just political, either. New technologies, specifically AI, are having far-reaching consequences on financial markets, the workplace, and traditional jobs. What jobs will be lost in this process? What industries are going to be destroyed by these changes, and which ones will harness them to achieve new success?
“Many,” is my best answer. If you’re a business leader, this period of disruption probably makes it feel like you can’t catch your breath. Much like when a tree falls in a forest and knocks over another, every move in the political, technological, or economic world seems to have a ripple effect. The connections between politics, business, and technology are tighter than ever, and a mistake in one area can create a cascade of challenges elsewhere. As we consider the next few years of business and world markets, the only certainty seems to be uncertainty.
But this is where the lesson from my ramen dinner comes in. When there is mass uncertainty and a whole lot of the unknown barreling toward you, your best defense is having the right tool. And as a business leader in uncertain times, your best tool is information. In the face of precarity, your ability to absorb, process, and act on information will define your success (or lack thereof).
Unfortunately, this confluence of disruptors is also happening at the same time that we’re seeing a stark decrease in the number of reliable, omnibus sources of information. Traditional media has by and large bifurcated along partisan lines, and this leaves all of us in the unenviable position of filtering out the noise while accessing the information that we critically need to make informed choices.
So what can you do about it?
Start building up your information network now. Include some classic traditional media, but don’t limit yourself. Find thinkers or bloggers or even TikTokers (while the platform is still around) who present up-to-date information on subject areas that matter to you and your business.
To be clear, I’m not advocating for taking everything you hear on TikTok as fact. You need someone (ideally a few someones) who does their research and analyzes credible sources to give you the information that you need to know. Remember, information is a tool, and in the coming years you’ll want the sharpest tool you can get your hands on.
So, as we enter 2025, yes, we’re looking at uncertain times. But uncertainty doesn’t have to be paralyzing. Take some time to look critically at your information sources and ensure that you’ve got a healthy, regular diet of information that’s enriching and will keep you prepared in an exceptionally chaotic environment. While the future is here, it is unevenly distributed. You want in on it first. The most effective tool? Information.
In any managerial space, there’s going to be talk about change. Sometimes this is recognizing the fear of it that many people hold, but more often, the common wisdom is that organizations need to evolve or die. Organizations set up entire departments for the purpose of facilitating change - as well as buying books, putting people in change-management roles , and revising org charts — all in the name of progress.
People are, naturally, surprised when all of this work often doesn’t result in real, meaningful change.
There was one instance where I was involved in driving change in an organization that desperately needed it — well, there has been more than one instance of that in my career, but there’s one in particular I want to discuss. The organization desperately needed to revamp the way it went to market, so my team and I created a lot of great, thorough strategy documents and did a lot of leg work on developing what the new approach should be and communicating that throughout the organization.
And well, then not much else happened. I walked into the conference room and saw a message on the whiteboard that said: “Culture eats strategy for lunch.” This, to me, is reflective of the reticence to change that you can usually find at any level of a business. A fear of the unknown drives a lot of this fear, but I would challenge that a greater portion stems from personal insecurities about one’s ability to adapt and/or skepticism about having the time to adapt.
I saw this clearly while working with an organization recently that wanted to add in new software and update some old processes to improve their lacking customer service. These were not dramatic changes, but upon trying to implement them, I immediately got a lot of pushback from folks along the frontline, mostly to the tune of, “I’m too busy! I don’t have time to make this faster!”
That thought really struck me: I don’t have time to get better or faster at this because I’m busy. I reflected a lot on the resistance to change and how to give people the space, emotionally and practically, to enact positive changes.
The natural conclusion of this pondering is, of course, that I’m going to start tinkering with things. And I encourage you to do the same in your own life — ask yourself, “Why aren’t I where I want to be? What’s the thing getting in the way of allowing me to make changes?”
For the purposes of this thought experiment, I’ll assume that you’ve already done the foundational work of developing a clearly articulated vision and reason for why the change is necessary. Logically, this probably feels like it should result in change. But even with a clear vision and proper tools at the ready, how are you giving people time and tools to make these adaptations?
Do you bring in extra help? That can take some of the work off your peoples’ plates while they adjust, but it also scares people and gives them the impression that they might be due for replacing, especially during a time of larger change. Or maybe do you bring in trainers instead, although you run the risk of it being another do-nothing training session passed down by higher-ups that doesn’t result in a meaningful difference in daily operations?
However you do it, you have to find a way to shift the workload without stopping cash flow. And frankly, that can get pricey. You might consider starting a change in the culture as an investment, just like buying new hardware. Your goal, then, is to make that investment in a way that will yield observable results.
Because what I know for sure is that just telling people that they have to change doesn’t cut it. I’m guessing that you’ve been up against resistance to change before as well. On my part, I’m going to make those investments in giving people the space and comfort to make the changes that the organization needs to see. My hypothesis is that this will lead to a lot less pushback and I’ll see a nice return on my investment in facilitating these changes.
Or maybe I’ve misidentified the issue and people will be just as averse to change as ever. The only real way to know is to run my tests and figure it out.
One curious thing about management introducing new tools and toys for their employees is that, undeniably, not all change is good. At the same time, no change is rarely the right answer. Good management, though, is having the wisdom to listen to your people, look at the market, and try to understand which changes your organization needs to make to keep apace with the world. That is more of a constantly moving goal than a destination one reaches, but I still think it’s worth striving for.
I find it fascinating that so often people will come up with a great idea or product, put all of this time and effort and consideration into making it the absolute best that it can be…and then they watch it fail because they never gave it a good name. And I don’t mean that they thought about it and chose a bad name. In my experience, people simply don’t name things or give them an easy, thoughtless label that doesn’t create any sense of identity or purpose.
I’ve been guilty of this in the past. When my children were younger, they adopted a cat and my wife and I generously (perhaps foolishly) let them name it whatever they wanted. They chose Pud. Why? I could not begin to imagine, but I share this to illustrate the importance of getting out in front of naming something rather than leaving it to chance.
Early in my career, I took over management of a media company where they established a smart program of pre-booking an interesting collection of fixed and unique spots, which had to be reserved on a long-term basis. The very wise concept was to lock in recurring revenue so you started each month with a solid base, in exchange for a discount to the customer.
When I got there, they were only half reserved and the sales team groaned if you asked about it. Digging into the program, I was handed the log that tracked it, the “Base Revenue Worksheet.”
This was the name given to it by the accountant who set it up, and it turns out the sales team just took that exact page out as support material. I mean no disrespect to accountants, but if you’re a retailer and someone comes to talk to you about this great, game-changing product that they should definitely buy right now, how excited are you going to be when that product is called the Base Revenue Program?
Understandably, the company struggled to keep the spots filled. When I had control, we burned the worksheet, rebranded it, and moved some of the styling around so that sales would see it as a brand-new product with a catchier name like Sales Success Features. Suddenly the Sissyphian task of selling it became much easier, and spots started selling out consistently. Just by changing the name…
The topic of naming came up for me recently while sitting around the table with my family. My daughter talked about her coffee with oat milk and how great it was. I said that I didn’t understand — words mean things, and mammals produce milk, whereas vegetables and fruits can be made into juice. To me, she was more accurately putting oat juice in her coffee.
My daughter disagreed, so I sought support from the very educated members of my family. I was, however, summarily thrown under the bus, saying that the meaning of the word milk was sufficiently malleable to encompass byproducts of oats or almonds.
For the record, I still disagree.
Nevertheless, this did get me thinking about how much a single word can matter. My personal feelings aside, we can all acknowledge that adding oat juice to your coffee would be unthinkable, but adding oat milk to your drink feels natural and easy. The manufacturers certainly could have tried to market oat juice, but because they put in the time to think of a clever name, Starbucks now has a new way to increase the price of your already overpriced morning beverage.
As you look at your own business and product/service offerings, how well have you done at creating thoughtful, compelling labels? One company I work with was contemplating a live training series, but nobody seemed inclined to give it a name beyond Live Training Series. When I insisted, despite pushback, that it did in fact need a name, they took some time to consider how they wanted to position this offering.
This was during the height of the pandemic, and the name that they came back with was perfect — Thrive. Because at that moment, nothing sounded more compelling than the idea of not just surviving, but thriving.
The series was a great success and went on to spawn more conferences and live training events. Do I think that this was wholly due to the name? Certainly not — a lot of intelligent, talented people put hours of work into making a great product that did exactly what it promised to do. But the name gave the program an identity, a life, a purpose.
So as you work on developing your own products and advancing your company, pay close attention to how you’re naming (or not naming) things. Regardless of the specifics of your business, words matter. Because nobody has ever wanted to put almond juice in their coffee.
Isn’t it always about time? The reality is that everyone in the workforce measures their time: You’re either clocking in and paid by the minute or being paid in bulk and tracking your time to make sure you can carve out a good career and a personal life.
All this to say, time is important no matter who you are. I got my first lesson in this at one of the sales training sessions I attended when the trainer asked us, “Why is time like money?” The answer, of course, is that you can spend it, save it, invest it, etc.
As a rookie salesman, I of course wrote it down in my notes eager to absorb all the wisdom from these oracles. But over a long career, it’s occurred to me that this approach to time management may have shaped my relationship with my schedule more than I’d realized. Specifically, I had this revelation during a car ride recently.
One of my colleagues, Troy, was coming to pick me up for an event. And while I’m a proud early riser, I’m a “walk the dog, read the paper, check my email” kind of early riser, not a “ready to be seen by the public” type. This particular day, I was up at 6 AM to get ready for Troy to pick me up an hour later.
At a quarter to 7, I called to my wife that Troy was picking me up today at 7:00. Then I said, “You know what? Troy is an early person; I bet he’s sitting out front at 12 till and I’ll still be here in my underwear.” To which the woman of my dreams responded, with no small amount of skepticism, “You’ll be lucky if you’re in your underwear.”
What can I say? She knows me.
Sure enough, I get a text from Troy at 6:49 that he’s here and waiting out front, but that I don’t have to rush. Just because I saw this exact situation coming didn’t mean that I liked it; I was indignant. “11 minutes!” I groused to myself. If I had to wait for 11 minutes and do nothing but sit in my car, I’d blow a gasket. In that time, I could get 3 emails returned or formulate an idea and get people to start working on it. 11 minutes is an eternity!
At 7:02 I walked out and, as promised, Troy was very patiently waiting out front. I shared my own perspective on his earliness and we had a good laugh about it. He explained that long ago he’d decided he didn’t like being late, so now he’s always exceptionally early. I asked how he justifies the loss of time, and he said that he’ll spend his time waiting to talk to people or work on an idea, but he couldn’t stand being the last person in a meeting.
I can’t be anything but the last person in a meeting. If you ever have an appointment with me and I’m two minutes early, it means that my world is on fire.
We both laughed about our own peculiarities and went on to have an excellent time at the event. Later, as I reflected on the conversation, my brain kept circling around how we could both be successful professionals with such widely different approaches to time management. If his system worked, I reasoned, then maybe it was worth giving it a try.
My old system worked with a series of color blocks for my schedule. While helpful, this system was extremely rigid and stressful, because once I put down a color block on my calendar, I was then beholden by the business gods and my own anxieties to work on that exact project at that exact time. If a time block opened, I filled it, and fast.
The new approach is a lot looser. Now, I make a list of A, B, and C priorities that I want to work on with special note of tasks with impending deadlines that can’t be pushed back. I’m six weeks into my experiment, which I’m calling fluid time management. Note to the reader: Google doesn’t think anyone else is using this, so, you heard it here first! Regardless of the name, though, my new approach really has cut down on my stress.
I still have anxiety that things won’t get done, of course. But by being more focused on the tasks I want to complete rather than on the exact second that I complete them, I find that, perhaps ironically, I’m not pushing things to the last possible second as often. More often than not, I find myself reaching the end of the day feeling like I got done enough to feel like my day was productive, and I’m not stoking the flames of my own neuroses by managing myself down to the minute.
So my question, as always, is what do you make of going from a highly structured time management system to something less hands-on? I’ll check in again in a month or two (or three if my stress levels are still lower), but in the meantime, I’d love to hear your thoughts on this experiment or your own approach to time management!
In the early days of the internet, its prophets preached that it would bring freedom — a specific kind of freedom that they called disintermediation. In addition to being a very attractive buzzword, disintermediation describes the process of cutting out the middle man. Disintermediation, they promised, would get you the best prices on what you wanted to buy, unfettered access to information, and eliminate any and all barriers between you and the product/provider/information that you were looking for.
The role of the middle-man, though, is a time-honored tradition. While examples undeniably go back further, the first example that I think of is traders who used to run ships from Continent A to Continent B, buy a product, hope they didn’t die on the trip back, sell their product for 20x the price they bought it for, and repeat until they were either rich or dead.
This role of the intermediary would later be seen in print media via priests who could read books (although primarily the Bible) and tell you what it said — or at least what they decided you should think it said. This made them some of the earliest editors and gatekeepers of information, and they used it to great effect in controlling local populations.
As literacy became a tool for the common people instead of just second and third sons of noble families, though, things changed. People were able to interpret books for themselves, which gave rise to newspapers, radio, television, etc. In all of these mediums, though, you still had the middleman deciding what you needed to see and why, effectively standing between you and information.
In the same vein, retailers may have stopped risking life and limb, but Macy’s and JCPenny still served the role of the intermediary. They sourced clothing from providers and exercised a level of quality control that, in theory, meant you knew what you were buying and had some amount of certainty in your purchase.
Things are different in the age of the internet, though. Now, I go online and buy things directly from my preferred brand, but this hasn’t resolved all my problems as a consumer; rather, it’s shifted them. Now when I order a shirt, it inevitably arrives either in the wrong size because it uses another country’s sizing chart or it’s of such a poor quality that I’m not realistically going to wear it. Without an intermediary, the impetus is on me to figure out what the right solution is and who I can trust to sell a high-quality product.
We see the same issues in media and information; disinformation has replaced disintermediation as the word of the day, and many consumers aren’t happy with the state of things. People are starting to miss being able to reliably get products and information that has been vetted and provided by an intermediary.
This leads to an important question: Is the pendulum about to swing the other way? Could we be seeing a shift in thinking that leads us back to the era of the intermediary and gives consumers an easier, less stressful way to buy t-shirts and obtain information?
As you’re planning the direction that your business is going, it’s important to be aware of this shift in thinking and to try to position yourself advantageously. This is a broad question, so to avoid going too macro with it, I find it helpful to think about what you can do to anticipate and adapt to these kinds of changes.
For instance, look back at what your industry was doing in, say, 1950. Then ask yourself, what had changed by the time 1975 came around? What about the year 2000? And what will the situation be in 2025? These kinds of broad, major shifts take about a generation to move their way through the zeitgeist and become ingrained.
As you ask yourself these questions, also consider where your business fits in the intermediary vs. no-intermediary debate. Personally, I have a foot in each world, with some businesses that can operate great on the 1-1 exchange and others that function as a middleman for consumers. There isn’t a “better” camp to be in, but if you want to be ready for coming changes, then you certainly need to know which approach you’re currently in, decide where you think the trend is going, and plan accordingly.
So, as you contemplate your next strategic move, remember: Whether you're betting on disintermediation or embracing the comeback of the intermediary, just be sure your business isn't caught standing in the middle of the road. Because that's where you get run over.
If you’re lucky, then you probably spend a lot of your time as a leader or executive knowing, more or less, what you should be doing. But that surety of purpose doesn’t mean that things can’t go off the rails. That’s why it’s important to stay attentive and listen to what the world around you is trying to tell you. Personally, I think of it as listening to the jungle drums.
This harkens back to when I was a kid watching Tarzan in black and white on the TV. When something was happening in the show, drums would play to communicate messages across the jungle. I was enamored with this (to my experience) unconventional means of communication, and now I see a striking resemblance between the world of my career and that of the show.
In leadership, you’re often distanced from your customers. After all, your role is to be high up on the hill for a clearer perspective and use that information to guide your people and point them in the right direction. But while this position is useful, it does make it harder to know what’s going on down in the jungle. Hence the utility of the drums.
But the drums are only useful as long as you’re listening for them, and it’s easy to miss their rhythm if you’re focused on other things.
Specifically, you need to be listening for things that don’t fit your normal paradigm. It can be tempting to dismiss outlying data as a fluke — sales were down on a certain day because it was raining. And while yes, sometimes a blip is just a blip, it’s important not to dismiss it out of hand. If you discount any information that doesn’t coincide with what you already expect, you won’t have any opportunity to adjust course as the weather changes.
So how do you follow up on this data to determine if it’s a fluke or a sign of coming change for which you need to plan?
The best places to start looking are with your customer service logs and your people. Do you see changes in the types of issues that you’re hearing? New objections to price or the quality of your products/services? A significant change in the amount of returns that you’re seeing?
Look for new patterns emerging in the data. Individual data points may not be of any great importance, but trends are what the jungle drums are all about. And when you see them, jump on them to figure out why they’re happening and what you need to do to either prevent a disaster or capitalize on this new opportunity.
I don’t want to keep this entirely theoretical, though, so let me show this concept in action with my own experience of trying to listen to the jungle drums.
Many years ago, our media company was having troubles with one particular delivery route where we had a high volume of complaints coming from one end of the street. We talked to the carrier and our other staff about this, but it never seemed to get resolved (or not for long, at least).
After several rounds of back and forth, we discovered that there was disconnect with a particular manager who was having trouble accurately describing the orders from the top. Hence our company’s repeated mistakes with this part of the route.
If I hadn’t listened to the jungle drums, we might never have figured out what the issue was and just written it off as a fluke. But because I took note of the spike in complaints and didn’t let the short-term fixes be the extent of our response, we discovered a breakdown in communication with our delivery crews and were able to circumvent larger problems before they could grow and start impacting other routes and other customers.
That’s a micro example, but a larger version happened in the 2016 presidential election. Famously, Clinton was projected to have a substantial lead in the polls. But of course, that Tuesday evening in November, many people were stunned to find that things hadn’t gone as they’d anticipated.
A lot of them were left wondering: What happened?
Well, the same thing that happened with our delivery route. There were signs that things weren’t going to work out in Clinton’s favor, but many (not all) pollsters were unable or unwilling to listen to the jungle drums of discontent. Whether that was a good or bad day for you, it’s a strong example of the necessity of listening to the world around you.
So go forth and keep an ear open for the jungle drums. And when you do hear them, don’t let yourself ignore them as background noise or random anomalies. Take them seriously, and use the information they give you to put yourself and your enterprise in as advantageous a position as possible.
In this column, I spend a lot of time talking about the things you should be doing. And I’ve gathered a lot of this advice by doing the wrong thing and learning the hard way over the course of the past 30 years. The crux of the issue is that I can give that kind of advice because it’s within the context of, “I did this wrong, but I learned my lesson and you can too.”
This time, I didn’t learn the lesson. Or at least, not as fast as I should have. Early in my career when I worked in advertising with retail clients, our sales team would sit around a table and talk about all the things our customers foolishly weren’t doing: they weren’t merchandising correctly, missed advertising opportunities, and were just generally behind the game. If only they’d listened to us, we cried, they’d all be doing so much better!
Well, that was an attitude that I carried to other places in my career, including when I was buying and managing businesses as an executive. I say this to emphasize that I absolutely had the following events coming to me.
I recently jumped into operating a franchise with my son. And we chose a franchise specifically for all the guard rails and guidance that came with it. This gave us a long road map of how to get from our concept to our official opening, and when we picked out a date to launch six months in advance, we felt like we had the situation well in hand with our spreadsheets and weekly plans.
I believe it was Mike Tyson who said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
As we got closer to the grand opening, we started running into more and more problems. While we had very sound, well-researched plans, for some reason that didn’t seem to matter to the permitting department, vendors, the utility company, or literally anybody but us, in fact.
As the date got closer, we were quickly running out of time to actually get the doors open. At one point, my son and I were so close to getting mad at each other that we just broke down laughing. We were both giving it our all and our staff was doing great work, but there were about eight things that were supposed to be ready by then that just hadn’t come through due to a smattering of logistical issues.
Looking back on it, some of what got in our way around this pitch point was that we just weren’t using the playbook. That’s a little embarrassing because, as I mentioned, we chose a franchise operation specifically to have access to that kind of instruction. But as we got busier and busier, it became easier to skip the extra instructional videos because we knew better and already had so much on our plates.
Now, it seems obvious that doing the extra training would have saved us more time in the long run — you’d be shocked to learn how much faster inventory goes when you know how to do it the right way. And I’m mostly kicking myself because this was a lesson that I already knew.
Throughout my career, I built a record of success by sticking to the playbook. And that didn’t mean just following it myself — it also meant making sure that my team knew the playbook and knew how to use it. Because there are times and places to be innovative or creative and make big, sweeping changes. But when it comes right down to it, almost any business’ core operations can be written down in a playbook and followed.
The point of this exercise isn’t just to offer some long-overdue apologies to my former clients who were going through something that I didn’t understand at the time. I also want you to consider, do you remember your playbook? And if you do, are your people still following it? I know how things can fall to the wayside as new ideas take up focus, but don’t forget to stick to the core practices that keep your business afloat.
In the end, we had a successful launch that could have been a bit better but was still good. We were able to dig ourselves out of the hole we found ourselves in, but if we’d followed the playbook from the beginning, we wouldn’t have had a hole to dig out of. We’d be on a hill and have a better vantage point to see further and with more clarity.
Revisit your playbook and make sure that you’re not accidentally getting lost like we did and losing sight of your business’ core processes.
In my career, I’ve closely examined many different types of organizations working in different areas. But for all the many differences I see in business perspectives and how an organization is run, I find that businesses tend to fall into one of two categories: yesterday businesses or tomorrow businesses.
A yesterday business falls back on “well this is how we’ve always done it, so this is how we should continue doing it.” And for a lot of American history, this strategy has been enough for plenty of businesses to succeed.
But in the last 20 years, we’ve seen a growing class of disruptors who take the old model and find a way to change it for tomorrow. Think of how money-transferring services like PayPal have all but replaced paper checks as an example.
When discussing this dichotomy, it can be easy to think that the default is that everyone should be a tomorrow type of business. But at present, the old school and the new school are coexisting more or less peacefully in most sectors.
That likely won’t last forever, but if you’re not worried about what could change in 20 years, then you may not have a reason to be concerned about looking into the distant future.
I recently saw an example of this dichotomy when my most recent car lease ended. Yes, every financial advisor I know hates my three-year leasing cycle, and no, I do not plan to change it, so please be kind, readers who work in finance.
In my leasing cycle, I’ve seriously considered going electric many times, but I felt that the industry needed more time to mature. So when my lease ended, I decided to take a look at Tesla.
This experience was completely at odds with every car-buying experience I have ever had in my life. I’m used to the poorly lit car dealership where they try to upsell you on packages, nudge you into something else, and then send you home so you can come back in a couple of days to sign a mountain of paperwork.
My Tesla experience barely involved talking to other human beings. It started by going on their website to schedule a test drive, putting in my driver’s license information, and selecting my location (depending on where you live, they’ll even bring it to you).
When I arrived for my appointment, I didn’t even need to show my ID. Instead, they gave me a card to start the car, and away I went because the car had GPS and they already knew who I was.
So I went out to the lot, found the car that I’d scheduled a drive for, and I was off. I came back and told them I was interested and wanted to hear what they had for sale. The associate told me that they had no idea what was currently available, so my best bet was to check the app.
Thus ended the human interaction portion of buying a Tesla. I went on the app and picked a car that I liked, and was pleasantly surprised to find that everything was simple and clean without any “comfort packages” or other upselling opportunities.
While I could’ve had it delivered to my door, I decided to go to the service center to pick up my new Tesla. After giving them my credit card number and some basic leasing and insurance information, I was all set to pick up my new car.
The point of all of this isn’t to endorse Tesla or anyone in particular. It isn’t even to say that you should get a fancy app or a shinier product.
The point is that Tesla has combined a shiny new product with an entirely new experience that makes you feel like you’re shopping in the space age fantasy of what the future will be like.
After all, Tesla is far from the only manufacturer of electric cars. But the reason they stand out, and why they’re undeniably a forward-looking business, is that while other organizations are selling new products the old way, Tesla has invented a completely new way to sell that matches their futuristic product.
This is what a tomorrow business does. It takes risks and it isn’t afraid to start over from scratch to be unlike anything else a competitor can offer.
Does this guarantee that Tesla will one day vanquish the old guard? Not necessarily. And I wouldn’t say that every business needs to reinvent the wheel (or the whole car in this case).
Rather, the message here is that a sufficiently inventive organization can change the game and quickly acquire vast amounts of market share. And whether you ultimately decide to be an inventor or a member of the old guard, it’s important to know which direction your business is heading and what’s on the horizon for your industry.