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“It is always important to know when something has reached its end.  Closing circles, shutting doors, finishing chapters, it doesn’t matter what we call it; what matters is to leave in the past those moments in life that are over.”

Paulo Coelho

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“When you start to suck, stop.”

Kristen Hersh

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So. This is mostly about business <although, I imagine, some aspects bleed into Life>.

In business we create false endings all the time. And I mean ALL the time. Milestones, quarterly objectives, standards, etc. We do this not just because people have a tendency to work better aiming at something but also because we suck at knowing when something has naturally reached its end.

Now. I have written about stopping, or closing down, when you start sucking and how difficult that is.

Back in 2012 I said “sucking is like quicksand.  The harder you work to stop sucking the further you get sucked down into suckedness.”   A fun idea to write about, but that is different than recognizing an ‘end.’ That is simply not recognizing you have given all you can and it is all downhill from there <diminishing returns>. I have written about ‘periods’, the stop punctuation, and the art of knowing when to stop. A fun idea to write about but that is different than recognizing an ‘end’ … that is simply about not recognizing when you should shut up.

This post is about knowing, and I mean really knowing. when something has reached its end. Knowing that it is time to close, close up … and move on.

Uhm. This is hard. Really hard.

And, speaking for myself and how I think philosophically, I know I make it even harder. I once wrote about running through the end of project, I called it “riding to the buzzer.” Riding through things you are working on makes it a little more difficult to recognize whether you ran through a milestone or through its natural end. I say that because here is where a natural end truly becomes sneaky. 99% of the time it doesn’t appear as some brick wall or solid stop.

Sure. ‘The end’ most likely does have a stop sign around if you pay attention. More often than not any sign there is, is most likely covered up by some overgrown bushes which have never been trimmed. It seems a little strange because one would think we business people would be better at seeing ends and when to close up on something and move on. I mean, what the hell, business is strewn with milestones, objectives, deadlines and a slew of ‘people created’ ending points. Yet, most business people suck at the really important ability to know when something has reached its end.

We are not particularly good at it with regard to a company <uhm … companies actually do have life spans>.

We are not particularly good at it with regard to employee initiatives <once in place we have a nasty habit of thinking it should be an ongoing ‘organizational culture tool’ which enables consistent behavior>.

We are not particularly good at it with regard to existing products & services <what happens when there is actually something better to be offered?>.

We are not particularly good at it with regard to sales objectives <what happens when our stated audience is … uh oh … sated?>.

In fact. What we are particularly good at is getting whatever it is that we want done into a “doing” mode and then developing a whole slew of ways to nudge it down the road. I imagine if I stick with that metaphor I could suggest we suck at not seeing any stop signs because we are too focused on nudging and tweaking the engine and replacing shoes so people can keep walking down that road. But ‘being over’?

Whew. We hold on way beyond the sell date. Everyone does <me included>. It is natural.

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Letting go. Everyone talks about it like it’s the easiest thing. Unfurl your fingers one by one until your hand is open. But my hand has been clenched into a fist for three years now; it’s frozen shut.

All of me is frozen shut. And about to shut down completely.

Gayle Forman 

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It is natural because of the dreaded “what’s next?”

Yeah. In order to acknowledge an end, to close up shop and move on, you have to know what’s next. And not only that … you kind of have to already have a plan in place or at least a road to bus everyone over to where they can get off and start walking. Maybe that is where we business folk suck the most. It’s not that we don’t know when to stop we just don’t know how to start again. Start anew.

About the only time we are actually good at it is within a ‘forced end.’ As in … we have no choice.

As I typed that I thought about, well, a different kind of business — the business of having a band and the arrival of the Foo Fighters after the death of Kurt Cobain:

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“There were people that really resented me for starting this band. ‘How dare you start another band?’   They asked me ‘Why did you decide to carry on and make music that sounds like Nirvana?’ and I said well, wait a minute – like, loud rock guitars, and melodies, and cymbals crashing and big-ass drums?

‘Cause that’s what I do. What do you want me to do? Make a reggae record?”

Dave Grohl

<Foo Fighters>

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When viewing the music industry and bands and individual artist you can find a lot of examples of forced ‘doing what needs to be done and moving on’ as well as ‘well, it is time to move on’ type endings <we business people should think about that a little>. When forced, talented business people do what needs to be done.

Unfortunately most of business doesn’t really create this kind of ‘forced decision.’ Most times we simply try and squeeze whatever we can out of whatever we have. And we squeeze until there is nothing left <way beyond the ‘end’>.

Ok. What to do. This is solvable and relatively easy in the scheme of things.

It is a version of ‘planned obsoletion’ <which I have always been a HUGE fan of in business>, but your senior management team needs to sit down on occasion and not do ‘blue sky thinking’, but hunker down like a military plan of action and say “we won this ground and what ground do we attack next.” This includes an attitude which says we will aggressively pursue that plan <so it is not just a plan but a plan of action>.

Far too often we look at the ground we have won and seek to consolidate it and, well, consolidate it. Squeeze and squeeze and squeeze. And, on occasion, we fool ourselves into thinking we are truly exploring ‘what’s next’ by saying ‘let’s take that hill just outside of the area we currently occupy.’ We make it sound like some massive effort that will refresh us. Instead we are investing significant resources on a less than significant objective. I am certainly not suggesting that incrementalism does not have a role in business strategy but rather we far too often use incrementalism to ignore the stop sign we just walked past. I am not a big SWOT analysis guy nor am I a big ‘white space’ business guy. I am more a pragmatic “this is who I am and this is what I am good at and I don’t care who I may compete against or what they may be currently doing I believe ‘these x’ people will like what I have to offer and I am going to go get it” business guy.

In a growth situation <which, by the way, I tend to believe any healthy organization should always be in> you should be seeking to grow. To expand. To think of ‘saturation’ as a swear word. To always be thinking about how to shake-the-etch-a-sketch so that stagnancy <in sales, attitude, behavior, thinking> never sets in.

To be clear. Sure. I believe you should always talk with your innovations/new product pipeline people because they may have some new widget up their sleeve you can go and expand your business with but, more often, you will be successful by looking at what you have now and finding new ground to attack with that. I have found your new widgets just have a tendency to cement the ground you have already won more often than not. Keeping with the military analogy I often tell businesses to think of their business modeling with an ‘occupation force’ team with a separate “attacking army” team mindset. Especially if you are in a growing category you almost have to have a “win this ground and move on” attitude or you can get stuck in a grind-it-out business war.

Regardless. It is important to know when something has reached an end. If only because it permits us business folk to close it off, leave it behind, not invest more energy squeezing something that has really ended <even though we do not want to admit it> and move on to the next chapter of our business life.

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“Do not fear to lose what needs to be lost.”

Sue Monk Kidd

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“No enterprise can exist for itself alone.

It ministers to some great need, it performs some great service, not for itself, but for others…or failing therein, it ceases to be profitable and ceases to exist.”

Calvin Coolidge

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“Let’s be honest. There’s not a business anywhere that is without problems. Business is complicated and imperfect. Every business everywhere is staffed with imperfect human beings and exists by providing a product or service to other imperfect human beings.”

Bob Parsons

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Originally posted in 2017

Let me take a minute and discuss “fraternite” in business.

Just a reminder but “fraternite” is one of the  French values of Liberté, Fraternité and Egalité (“liberty, equality, fraternity/brotherhood” the national motto of France).

Anyway. Business. Inevitably a great organization exhibits both efficient AND effective progress. What typically creates that combination is part discipline, part structure (systems), part leadership, all glued together by “fraternité”. That ‘glue’ is most often discussed in the American business world as ‘a vision’ or maybe ‘a purpose’ or even ‘culture.’ We do so because we Americans hate any kind of lack of specificity. But the truth is that the most common bond of a great organization is a more nebulous concept, i.e., one of “fraternité”.

Or.

“Any man aspires to liberty, to equality, but he cannot achieve it without the assistance of other men, without fraternity.”

Napoleon

Oddly enough, while this sounds like relatively common sense, I kind of feel like business itself needs a revolution to overturn the current thinking to accommodate what should be common sense.

What do I mean? Current business is kind of in a wacky spot. It talks a lot about vision and purpose and culture as if they are “things” — like maybe a lighthouse anyone can see as they bob around the chaotic sea of business life to find a way home. By the way, I would argue that is a very individualistic thought — “I can find my way home” type thought – and not really a team thought <but that could quite easily be debated>.

Regardless. Fraternity is more like “everyone not only knowing what they need to do to keep the ship afloat but actually pitching in whether needed or not because they love the ship itself.” That may sound like some wacky nuance, but I have to warn people that revolutions can kind of gain some momentum off of some fairly wacky things on occasion. By the way, this thought is a more nebulous “I feel this way” aspect of organizational culture and, as noted many times, if it cannot be measured or indexed or scored.

** note: most older leaders into today’s business just don’t like that kind of shit – things they cannot measure or score.

Anyway. Not to beat this metaphor to death, but I do believe we need a semi-revolution in the way business organizations are created and run and managed. I think we may need that revolution because “fraternité” as a core principle just ain’t the way business is run today. And, yes, it should be viewed as a “core” principle because … uhm … when discipline falls apart, when structure falls apart, when leadership falls apart what keeps you on the battlefield and fighting is … yeah … “fraternité.” Yeah, yeah, yeah. A lot of people talk about a “community” or “company team” or some other nice sounding platitude which sounds a lot like “fraternité”, but its mostly lip service. Its lip service because fraternité is a ‘collective’ thought and most businesses reward and incentivize individuals.

Anyway. On a bigger organizational level I worry about how an idea like this is getting suffocated by generational issues <younger people desire something and older people think they know the best> and maybe an outcome-is-the-only-thing-that-matters worldview versus a belief business should incorporate altruistic aspects. Both of those conflicts are HUGE issues. I have written about in 1200+ word thought pieces on both of these but, on the former, the best piece I can share is from Corporate Rebels “Cut The Crap: The Made-Up Nonsense About Generations At Work” which states all people want meaning at work (regardless of age or generational label).

I actually believe we need some revolutionary thinking on the latter. To me we have a bunch of people who look at business and turn away to non-profit because … well … I fear that they only believe they can change the world through more altruistic pursuits and not traditional business. And, yes, they are important and good pursuits but, from a larger perspective, business drives the world. Business makes shit that makes lives easier and healthier and impacts the home and life in ways that it is difficult to imagine let alone outline in a few words <and the business office/working groups creates behavioral cues which ripple out into culture>.

Somehow … someway … we need to insert the ‘believers of principles and principled behavior’ into the business world with all of their ambition and hope and remind them, empower them and enable them that they can change the world.

That they can make the world a better place. They can make society and people and lives better. And they can do it in and through business, not just altruistic career opportunities. If we do that, and do that well, I tend to believe we will build more organizations driven at its core by a sense of “fraternité” rather than a bunch of documents setting out some guiding or shared values, vision and purpose which everyone says “okay … let’s do that.”

What I do know is that … well … read the following quote:

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“I have found no greater satisfaction than achieving success through honest dealing and strict adherence to the view that, for you to gain, those you deal with should gain as well.”

Alan Greenspan

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I do believe we need to be drawing some lines in business. And I don’t mean company handbook type lines or even some well-crafted ‘lines’ in “how we conduct our business” or “who we are” but maybe they are more lines with regard to some unwritten principles.

I say that because when you can gather a group of people together who share a strong set of principles they will walk straight into a hail of bullets to not only survive, but to get good shit done.

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“Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace.

Oscar Wilde

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Now. Business absolutely makes dealing with your principles a constant struggle. It can kind of suffocate your principles in between the pragmatic aspects of getting shit done <discipline & structure> and how that shit is designed to meet specific objectives/results and the faux burden of some vision or grander purpose which “you know is important to us therefore it should be important to you”, i.e., extrinsic importance not intrinsic importance. Frankly, when suffocated by these bookends you don’t have a lot of elbow room for any type of true, intangible, unsolicited camaraderie.

The fraternité is more forced than natural. Obviously, when it is not natural it is not as strong.

In the end.

Fraternité in business. I believe we have forgotten this. And while I do believe many of us have forgotten how to draw lines with regard to our principles I tend to believe business, in general, has simply decided to just draw lines <in a box in fact> and say “there you go”, i.e., there are your principles and rules for camaraderie.

That is kind of whack.

Look. I can honestly tell you that being a senior leader in a business and organization you like <you do not have to love> may be one of the greatest experiences anyone can ever have. What makes that experience truly great is when you are fortunate enough to foster something intangible, something that really cannot be measured, and something which doesn’t earn you some performance bonus at the end of the year … it is when you stumble upon the sense of fraternité.

I am sure some organizational guru will send me a link to “steps to build a fraternité organization” and … well … good for them. I tend to believe this is one of those intangible things that is created less by some “how to” guide or some formula and more by simple good intentions combined with some good discipline, construct and leadership. To steal another word from the motto, by creating a fraternité organization you inevitably create liberté for the organization to be the best version of what it can be.

This is what I thought about today and “liberty, equality, fraternity <brotherhood>”. With that I imagine I should end with where I began … no enterprise can exist for itself alone. That is the foundation for a fraternité organization. Ponder.

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“I see a lot of people in unstimulating relationships. If people were a little less scared of ending things they’d get more out of life.  You meet the right person at the right time and they fulfill a certain something in your life. You fulfill something in theirs.

But there’s a time limit to that. “

Laura Marling

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“When inspiration does not come to me, I go halfway to meet it.”

Sigmund Freud

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So. Unstimulating relationships. This is actually about business and about ‘time limits.’

As a business manager you end up grasping a couple of truths about your employees and their relationship with what they do, their work, their careers and the company.

The first truth is that many of the employees are just doing their job. They are in a relatively unstimulating relationship with their job & career and they are kind of okay with that.

As a manager you genuinely try and make the relationship a little more simulating for them and, if you are truly genuine, while the these employees may never get as passionate or interested as you would like they appreciate you caring enough to try and, on occasion, will try harder for you and the company. This doesn’t mean they don’t care about their work and, in fact, if you highlight the contribution and impact their efforts make, they will care, just not find work particularly stimulating. I mention this as a first truth to acknowledge, which some organizational development people do not, that to some people a job is a job – no more and no less.

The second truth is that there are some employees who are actively seeking stimulated relationship with their jobs, careers and the company. If they are in an unstimulating relationship, suffice it to say, they will make you miserable out of their own miserableness.

As a manager you genuinely try and keep these employees stimulated. If you do it well, these people kill it. They are absolute monster achieving workers/thinkers/doers in the work place. Get it wrong with these employees and … well … most leave to find some stimulating relationship.

Understanding these two truths is surprisingly like getting a pail of cold water thrown in your face.

Well. At least it was for me.

I am not sure it was the same for others, but this may have been one of the most difficult things for me to understand, and deal with, when I moved from managing a group <where you get to hire everyone and try to have them match your attitude> to managing a company, multiple groups, departments and a bunch of people you do not hire yourself.

I, personally, struggled to understand how anyone could come into work each day, be relatively unstimulated and not only do good work, but actually want to come in and do good work every day.

But a lot of people do just that.

It took me awhile.

But I got it. At the same time I also understood that you never really let the unstimulated group of employees remain completely unstimulated.

You kind of never really let them completely start doing their work by rote or like robots. Mostly you just try to give them some positive stimulation on occasion like, as I noted earlier, encourage them to see how they contribute and their impact <this is different than incentivizing or trying to ‘game’ their behavior>.

Anyway.

The reality is that being an employee is a dance. You have a dance partner and sometimes there is a song you hate and do not dance, sometimes there is a song you hate and you are asked <or told> to dance and sometimes there is a good song and you will dance no matter what.

That is a fairly metaphoric example of a stimulating workplace.

But I will point out something I purposefully did. I suggested the bad song is playing in two of the three scenarios.

Yeah.

And that is still a stimulating relationship.

Go figure.

For some reason we seem to think people need to love their jobs all the time <or the significant majority of the time> or inject passion into what we do.

That is, frankly, a little nuts.

Mostly we should be seeking to have employees be proud of what they do <even if they don’t actually love what they do> and, as a manager, be wise enough to know what to overlook.

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“The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”

William James

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Work is called work, and not ‘play, for a reason.

It’s work.

And sometimes work takes some … well … work.

I could actually argue that the ‘working at work’ can be stimulating if you view it correctly.

But that really doesn’t sound logical enough to invest energy in.

And maybe that is the key to understanding this whole ‘unstimulating relationship” thing – logic.

I can truthfully say that behind closed doors senior managers talk far too much about “logical” ways to stimulate employees and tap into some mysterious passion muscle we absurdly believe every employee has within <to be focused on our business and their work within our business>.

Once again … that is kind of nuts.

To be clear. I do believe everyone has a passion muscle within, but to think it can randomly be directed toward ‘work’ <which, I will remind everyone, is called ‘work’ because it is work … and not play or relaxation or ‘fun’> is the nuts part.

Logically we should just accept the fact that many employees have mentally come to grips with a job in which they are not in an overly stimulated relationship with.

That doesn’t mean they don’t want to do a good job nor does it mean they will not care it just means that their job is more a paycheck and not a career.

All that said, let me close with where I started … “time limits.”

All employees have limits in an unstimulating relationship – all: the ones who live with being unstimulated and the ones who actively seek stimulation. I am fairly sure most employees don’t create tangible definable limits they more often probably fall into the “I will know when it is time.” 

All business managers should recognize that all employees have ‘time limits’ when it comes to anything unstimulating. What that means is you cannot get away with being an uninvolved, uninterested, un-energy creating manager for too long. I don’t mean to imply many managers do that, but I will note that creating stimulation and seeking to energize a stimulating relationship between your employees and your business is hard work.

It isn’t about some motto or slogan.

It isn’t about donuts in the mornings and fun team meetings on Fridays.

It is about finding ways to show employees that their work is respected, their contributions are valued and that there are opportunities to grow as a person <intellectually, skills or responsibilities>. Yeah. I just offered that up as a solution to stimulate relationships and nowhere in that was any activity or initiative. All I outlined was possible destinations – mind, body or leadership.

Nothing stimulates an employee business relationship more than being a business that suggest they will enable an individual to ‘be more than they are today’ if they have the time and interest. In my mind businesses with an unstimulated relationship with their employees may be doing ‘things’ but they are just going through the motions , maybe using too much logic, to create some false stimulation.

Here is the truth. Show people where they can go and tell them you believe in them and a shitload will be stimulated, all on their own, to engage in the relationship with their job and work. Ponder.

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obfuscate

This is the word to use when evasion is achieved by clouding the issue.

Creating a smoke-screen.

prevaricate, evade, dodge

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“When shrouded meanings and grim intentions are nicely polished up and pokerfaced personae are generously palming off their fantasy constructs, caution is the watchword, since rimpling water on the well of truth swiftly obscures our vision and perception.

(“Trompe le pied/wrong foot.”)”

Erik Pevernagie

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So. There is possibly nothing more aggravating in business than someone not answering “the” question. To be clear on what I am speaking about. The person answers a question just not the one you asked.

I am not going to argue that some questions are not easy to answer. I won’t even argue that we get asked questions we don’t know the answers to, but the situation dictates we make something up <yes … that happens in business>. But abandoning the question completely is complete bullshit.

But you know what?

I think the main reason it is so aggravating is because it is truly a reflection of intentions. There is even a book called The Anthropology of Intentions by a professor, Alessandro Duranti, who kind of tackles this whole discussion of intentions and words. He offers us the thought of ‘intentional discourse’ wherein an individual filters words through their beliefs & desires and their plans & goals to guide the discourse <regardless of whether the rest of the people want it guided that way>. In other words, using another phrase he offers us, by engaging in an intentional continuum people ponder their use of words through self-interest motivations <some good & some bad>.

By the way I am fairly sure I mangled his academic masterpiece, but you get the point.

Ah. “You get the point.” I share that again because while we sit there aggravated at someone who completely avoided answering the question asked we almost always also sit there wanting to invest a little of our own energy trying to assess why they did it. Because, in our aggravated minds, in its most simplistic viewing, avoiding the question is solely about shifting attention – away from something and toward something else.

…………… question deflection …………

Sure. It could be something as simple as steering you away from their lack of knowledge and steering you toward something they may actually know. But, in most cases, a full abandonment of a specific question is complete & utter deflection.

In the intelligence community they call this effort to shift attention as deflection or misdirection. Magicians do something similar getting people to focus on one thing and away from the trick itself. Completely avoiding the question is the business version of a distract-the-audience approach. It is this weird moment in which someone pretends to answer the question by actually answering some other question that magically appeared to replace the question really asked. It’s almost like entering an alternative universe for a while.

Sadly, aggravated or not, the more practiced the deception <the more practiced the business magician is> the more likely you hesitate to step in <and the more you get aggravated as you hesitate> and correspondingly … the more many of these people actually believe deception works.

It is maddening.

Worse? If they are good at it, when someone responds to a question by not addressing the points of the question, thereby avoiding the issue itself, it doesn’t create unrelated discussion to the issue … it simply avoids the issue in totality.

Well. I am fairly sure we have all sat there in a meeting and watched something like this unfolding right before our eyes. The visceral response, the aggravation, we have to this ‘answer evasion’ situation is most likely found in the revelation it is occurring (watching it unfold before our eyes). Philosophically, we can see that through some internal conviction to retain something they feel like they should own <their reputation, their title, their perceived intelligence, their whatever> they justify evading the question.

Conviction. Yeah. I just used ‘internal conviction.’ This means their intentions reflect they are more important than not only the question itself … but you. You are not even dignified with an answer.

It is irksome <at its least worst>.

It is loathsome <at its most worst>.

Look. I give a partial pass to the asshats you can see who have some answer they want to give everyone, regardless of what question is asked, and blurt it out when given the opportunity. They haven’t deflected the question they just ignored it as unimportant to what they want to say and have been planning to say no matter what has been said up to that point. It’s the ones you know heard the question and just ignored it. Or avoided it. Or just didn’t answer it despite the fact they heard every word, every syllable and every intention from the question giver. In other words, they intentionally do not answer the question.

<envision a deep sigh here>

I want people to face questions head on. And what makes this even more aggravating is that you know these people are quite capable of taking things head on.

How do I know that? These are the same people who will attack, or ‘aggressively question’, the intentions of the question giver themselves. It is a common tactic for the answer avoiders. The natural instinct is to ‘defend’; to answer the attack. Fuck that. I want to say “just answer the fucking question asked.”

How else do I know these people are quite capable of taking questions head on? These are the same people who will attack, or ‘aggressively question’, the question itself. This is not a deflection tactic. This is a ‘turn the question back on itself’ tactic. And, once again, your natural instinct is to defend or, well, answer the question you are asked.  Aggravating. I want to say “just answer the fucking question asked, you shithead.”

And maybe what makes this ‘not answering the question asked’ so maddening is that we, most sane pragmatic business people, tend to sit back <after saying “WTF”> and try and unravel why it happened and what the hell just happened. Unless you are in an interview scenario <in which you always have an opportunity, one-to-one, to hunker down and hammer out a clear answer> you are most likely in a room with other people and the non-answer has sent at least some of the people careening down a completely different road.

That makes it even MORE aggravating.

One intentional non answer to a question can completely derail a meeting or a discussion. That is intentional discourse. Or how about the other phrase from that academic’s book: engaging in an intentional continuum.

Oh. One last way you know these asshats are intentionally not answering the question is when they cleverly decline to answer the question with the infamous head fake answer: “I don’t know the answer to that question. I’ll work on finding the information for you and then get back to you with an answer” <and they have no intention of ever getting back to you>.

Yeah. You know … sure as shit … they have no plans to work on it and will never ‘get back to you’ unless you call them on it. They are intentionally refusing to answer the question assuming the conversation will move on and, in a laundry list of other shit to do, that this one will either never make the list or be so low on the list they can stiff arm you on answering based on “working on things more important.”

Its bullshit. You know its bullshit. They know its bullshit.

Well.

Fuck you.

Fuck you and the non-answering horse you rode in on.

In my mind a good well-articulated question demands some accountability. The one given the question is now accountable for the answer. They may try and deflect and they may just answer a completely different question, but a question asked exists, it does not disappear. You cannot get away from it.

Let me share a graphic example of why accountability remains whether the question dodger likes it or not.

You open your front door in the morning and there is a nice pile of dog shit squarely in the middle of your front door opening. You either clean it up or you avoid it. The question dodger never acknowledges the pile and steps over it moving on to something else. The shit stays at the front door and over time the smell increases and the flies crowd around. A good question unanswered is just like that. And a question dodger cannot avoid the smell in the end.

All that said. My message to the asshats who completely do not answer the question asked:  You will be accountable to the question and to cleaning up the mess … now … or later <and quit aggravating me by not answering the question, you shithead>.

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Author note:

When I reread this, which took me less than a ½ hour to write, I was a little surprised by how … well … aggravated the tone was.

Some ‘fucks’ and ‘asshats’.

I left it as is because as a 50something business guy who has always attempted to take on what needs to be taken on regardless of how painful it may have been <and career wise possibly less than prudent> I get a little angry about how the business world has become incredibly unkind to the risk takers & truth tellers and seems to reward the less-than-competent and ‘political maneuverers’ more often than it should. That’s my excuse for why I let this one stand as it does.

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Uh oh. Your company has slid down the slippery slope of brilliant irrelevance. Your business is in trouble.

This sucks because in the not too distant past you were standing at the top of the mountain looking down on everyone — head in the clouds blinded by bright success. Unfortunately, being at the top is heady business and companies easily, and often, step a little too far. Actually, you probably stepped nowhere, but instead the edge of the mountain eroded under your feet because you were looking up too much <or at the gobs of money you were making> and … oops … you just slid down the slope.

Here’s the good news. You have a chance. Albeit it is a small chance. But you do have a chance to get the hell off the slope and resurrect that frickin’ mountain you were standing on before. It’s a small chance because a whole bunch of things need to be done and need to be done right AND need to go right … but it can be done.

Some branding expert once wrote about this topic and cranked out the eight P’s <purpose, promise, people, product, place, price, promotion and performance> as “the way” to resurrect your company.

Uhm.

First. There is no ‘the way.’

Second. It’s a nice trick using all that assonance <all the P stuff>, but before anything else would happen I imagine most people would tell him to ‘piss off’ <that may be the 8^th P> rather than try and do all those things.

Third. Resurrection is hard. It is pushing that boulder back up the mountain.

So while many things need to go right I would say success in business resurrection resides in doing a few things well, with focus, and lots of resilience and determination. Of course, I am not as smart as that branding expert … so you may want to take these thoughts with a grain of salt: 

–          Refocus.

This is about focusing the entire organization. This can be resetting, it can be redefining, or it can simply be realizing that you have lost your focus. Personally, I am never quite on board with the people who say you need to redefine because that assumes you had a crappy definition in the first place which seems unlikely if you actually made it to the top (or close). More likely this is simply refocusing on what got you to the mountain top in the first place.
Refocusing the organization begins with clearly defining the brand and business vision and goals. I know where I mostly get aggravated with ‘rebranding experts’ is that they always seem to suggest a company needs something ‘new’  or recreate or, well, they seem focused on something new and glittery.

Here is a business truth. Brands and companies win not on glitter, but on the grind. And the grind is, well, not glittery. I say that because while you are grinding away and making gobs of money there will always be a bunch of people showing you shiny glittery objects suggesting now that you have had some success in the grind, you should be more, well, fabulous. They whisper “you are better than a ‘grind brand and company.’” Within that tempting glittery ‘I want to be fabulous’ gauntlet many a good company grinding away has been lured away from its focus. In fact. I would suggest the more success <or ongoing failure> a company has the easier it is to lose ‘grind focus‘. It is only when you aren’t entirely resoundingly successful or resoundingly a failure that you keep your nose to the grindstone. I imagine my point is that focus, in and of itself, isn’t glittery. To get off the slippery slope of irrelevance you often need to shed the glitter and refind the grindstone. And, yes, I purposefully chose this metaphor on my first point to reemphasize … this is work. This is hard.

And there is not a lot of glitter in refocusing <and resurrection> a business.

–          Relevance
This is about refinding the company’s true relevance. Because first & foremost the company has to have the perception <internally and externally> it is better at something. That almost sounds silly to point out, but if a company is in a resurrection crisis mode 99% of the time that ‘lack of focus’ that got them here has led to what I refer to as ‘fragmented relevance.’ What I mean is that success often breeds ‘following additional sales’ rather than ‘leading to additional sales.’ Let me explain. At some point things were going well and it became really really easy to begin to make niche or small business exceptions under the guise of ‘the customer wants it’ and it gave some signs of incremental sales <maybe not profit>. Your balance sheet is becoming strewn with these little exceptions which inflate your revenue and sales, but you aren’t making shit for profit from them. You are doing a lot but not getting a lot of return out of what you are doing.

This leads back to relevance. A company fools themselves into believing they are offering something relevant because they are responding to a customer, but it isn’t better or distinct, you are simply attempting to meet a customer need/desire.

In branding words you are flooding your brand with indistinct commodity like features. While each little thing looks … well, little, when viewed as a whole it becomes confusing to the outside world. What are you really good at? What is your best product? All that kind of stuff. You’ve lost perception relevance in people’s minds.

Ah. You have simply slipped down the slippery slope of irrelevance.

Many times a company will have to shed product/service offerings to resurrect. Uh oh. I told you this was difficult. If it helps, think of these things as little rocks weighing you down pulling you further down the slope <as well as making it an increased burden as you try and pull your company back up the slope>. Make sure that ‘better’ <the promise you are offering to anyone who wants to be associated with you> is relevant — to them, not to you.

** note: assessing what you need to shed can be very easy, shedding is often very difficult. I often ask businesses “how far would you go to survive” and “be prepared to abandon everything it does to survive.”

This means defining where you want the brand to be and then deciding how to get there.

This means making sure you are selling people ONLY the things that make you better. This sometimes means moving one foot forward to follow your customer as they have also become older and yet keep one foot solidly in a growing customer base.

Does this mean the company has to mean everything to everyone? Absolutely not. It is just all about remaining relevant to enough people so that you have a meaningful place in the world of business. 

–          Align 

This is always the tricky part. Whatever you have decided the focus is, you need to align everyone internally <without diminishing autonomy> and you need to reinforce this externally <consistent attitude & behavior>. A company has to be mercilessly disciplined and yet maintain the flexibility to accommodate the true fact that ‘a great plan never lives beyond first contact with the enemy.’ I imagine using the P methodology could help because this is what the five of the P’s are all about: people, product, place, price and promotion.

People.

You have to be disciplined on the focus anchor of the business pendulum. The pendulum will swing. You just want to insure that everyone’s pendulum is swinging off the same axis. There has to be employee commitment and confidence. In fact, in resurrection mode, they need to be ‘reinspired.’ This is very difficult during resurrection because you have most likely decreased the number of offerings <which implies they will have less to satisfy the customer with> and you may have laid some people off.

The organization has to believe that there is a <planned> future, the future will happen and that they can help.

Next. The products and services are the tangible evidence of the focus and relevance.

A company’s ONLY chance of resurrection is to be ruthless in assessing their product portfolio. Absolutely frickin’ ruthless. I will outline in price how I would go about figuring this out.

The next P is ‘place.’ Personally I think this is a forced P. This is about the experience or however and whenever and wherever a potential customer interacts and has an experience with your product portfolio and people.  Some people call this the face of the brand.

I don’t really care what you call it. The experience must be consistent everywhere. No ifs, ands or buts.

Ah. Then there is price. Whew. Resurrection almost always falls apart here. I almost always suggest a company do an audit of all their sales and define two main things:

–          How many sales did you make at full price <no customer discounts or exceptions or whatever>

–          How many sales did you make with an acceptable profit.

I almost always begin here because not enough companies do this. In addition it shines a spotlight on where they make money and how they make money.

I am not opposed to discounting <because there are some psychological aspects of selling it appeals to>, but I am opposed to not having an everyday price perception. Too often customer research will come back and say something like “well, that isn’t their real price.”

That’s bad.

People need to know your price or at least your pricing strategy. A good place to always start <part one> is simply decrease an emphasis on discounting.  An overemphasis on deals and discounts builds deal loyalty rather real loyalty <note: discounting is scary to eliminate>.

A good place to start <part 2> is clearly define your pricing strategy. Despite what you may believe. a company does not have to be low price every day.

Yes. Building value perceptions is really difficult. But you know what? So is resurrecting your company. Resurrection doesn’t even get off the ground if you screw up your pricing <value proposition>. As hard as it is to accept, resurrection is really not about sales, it is about value perceptions <sales will follow>.

Chew on that one for a while.

Promotion <or how and what you communicate>. Theme, slogan, visuals, sounds, it doesn’t matter.

Too often someone comes dancing in from the outside suggesting that “how exciting … you are rebranding! … we need to build some excitement!! … some flash & sizzle!!!” <and, yes, the number of exclamation points increase as the conversation continues>. To use Tolkien: “not all that glitters is gold.” Go back to my first point, companies and brands win by grinding. All communications, first and foremost, must be reflective of ‘the alignment grind.’ A consistent reflection of that promise. Disconnected messages and tactics destroy alignment, destroy inspiration internally, and destroy brands externally.

Ok.

Here is your bottom line on business resurrection. You want to, and have to, produce the right results, but you need to do it the right way.

Resurrection is relentlessly unforgiving.

Truth — you are honestly already on your way to death if you need to be resurrected. It drives me a little crazy that more companies don’t take on a ‘do this or die’ attitude in resurrection mode. Of course they are nervous <if not scared> so they inevitably discuss easing changes and gradually shifting … its crazy.

Resurrection is about shaking the etch a sketch or you slide down to the bottom of the slippery slope of irrelevance and die.

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Originally published November 2013

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“Incrementalism is how we slide into participation by imperceptible degrees so that there is never the sense of a frontier being crossed.” 

—-

Jonathan Glover 

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“Progress lies not in enhancing what is, but in advancing toward what will be.”

—-

Kahlil Gibran 

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Well. Incrementalism is a virus. And once you catch it is a sonuvabitch to cure.

I, personally, believe the entire business world, including new business incubators, has this virus. Incrementalism has seeped its way not only into mainstream business but also mainstream ‘innovation’ pipelines.

Yeah. Innovations too.

I dare any of you to walk the halls of your local business incubation center and find a real, “break the etch-a-sketch” idea in there. If you are lucky, you will find one. The majority of innovation ideas these days, incubators as well as established companies, is all about incrementally leveraging from something existing.

Sure. They may claim its “unique” and “a whole new way of doing things”, but the majority of the time, lets say 98% of the time, it is a derivative of something that exists. That is how far the incrementalism virus has reached into the business world.

But this post today isn’t about innovation. This is about how incrementalism just makes us sad. It makes us sad because if you embrace incrementalism that means you have given up on, well, something that is not incremental. You have given up on being able to do something big and risky and game changing. And, worst, you’ve given up on making any substantial decisions <because incrementalism is simply an excuse for not making a clear cut decision>.

Now.

You may not believe you have given it up because we, in the business world, actually cleverly use incrementalism to convince ourselves we are actually achieving big changes.

….. incrementalism dance ………

We do the dance of ‘small steps to achieve big change’ which is kind of some odd waltz in which we make the same moves over and over again and point to change as “we improved how we dance” <but we are still in the same place dancing with the same person dancing to the same music>.

To be clear.

Even I, someone who loves change and “shaking the etch-a-sketch” in business, have been sucked into the black hole of incrementalism.

We do an incredibly good job of convincing ourselves that big change is hard, shit, that any change is hard and almost impossible to do because ‘it is difficult to do’ (note: which is mostly a bullshit thought). Given that, we do an incredibly good job of convincing ourselves that the only way to effectively successfully implement change is through smaller thoughtful steps. All leading to … we do an incredibly good job of convincing ourselves of all that, in fact, so much so that’s all we do.

Look.

Big change is possible. You just need to be smart, thoughtful and choose the ‘big’ wisely and with open eyes. But nowadays we view ‘big’ as some place we need to work our way towards and not just something we do. Unfortunately, as soon as we step onto the incrementalism slippery slope it, more often than not, causes everyone to slide, unintentionally, into unchanging behavior <or microscopic change increments>. This means everyone does small thing after small thing which make everyone feel like they are changing and that shit is changing … uhm … all the while the world itself is changing faster.

This means in our incrementalism we are moving forward and, yet, falling behind. It’s like walking on a moving sidewalk in the wrong direction.

Maybe the worst part?

We do not even see the backwards effect of our supposed forward movement. This happens mostly because most of us suck at not only changing, but perceiving change. We easily lose sight of any change as we focus on the incremental activity we have wholly embraced as ‘progress’ <because we say in our minds: “big change is impossible and this is the way to do it!”>.

The other very real danger of incrementalism is that while you have your head down focused on the incremental task at hand not only may the rest of the world be moving faster than you – it may even turn. So you will keep plugging away plodding down your incrementalism path and all the while the rest of the world is now trundling away in a completely different direction.

By the way. In business this is bad.

Anyway.

I will absolutely admit that most of the business world absolutely recognizes the importance of seeking to continuously reinvent and innovation, yet, sadly mostly we are actually just going through the motions. The motions may look incredibly sensible but they really aren’t achieving any change of any significance.

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the term Incrementalism is also used as a synonym for Gradualism. Incrementalism is a method of working by adding to a project using many small incremental changes instead of a few (extensively planned) large jumps.

Logical incrementalism implies that the steps in the process are sensible.

============

I fully admit that convincing people that change is not hard <and overcoming ‘it pays to be sensible’> is hard. And I fully admit that the “big version” of this is even harder AND I admit that any non-incremental change is even more risky <which makes overcoming “it pays to be sensible” even harder>.

But that isn’t my point.

My point is that it seems like we have convinced ourselves in the business world that change is ALWAYS best achieved gradually and incrementally. We should always find the easy small steps and do them.

So what <you may be asking>?

This means we begin measuring the success of the business not by any real change, but rather defining our usefulness and worthiness by measuring it in increments versus the past. Incrementalism more often than not doesn’t get measured by how much closer to the ‘big change’ you are but rather by how far you have gone from what you were.

Uhm.

That is nuts. And while it is nuts that is almost exactly how over 90% of business conduct business <and their change>. Worse? This incremental behavior decision making actually bleeds into incremental decision making in general. Everyone starts believing that a bold decision just isnt worth it when you know everyone feels comfortable with an incremental decision.

Look.

While I always advocate timely good big change, I certainly would advocate embracing incrementalism on occasion. Business change is, and as always been, about choice. You look around and choose where incrementalism may be most effective and where ‘big change’ is actually needed. In other words, for doing smart change you do both within your business.

** note: this is exactly the same for strategy – deterministic & emergent. Emergent is simply another word for ‘unplanned for opportunity’ or opportunistic and typically is an opportunity for a non-incremental result.

Yeah.

I can do both at the same time. This has two benefits:

• Organization: all businesses need to be reinvented in some way. I cannot remember one business I have seen or been involved in that hadn’t established some routine that didn’t need to be changed significantly. Incrementalism steadies the organization by not destroying something, but rather fine tuning it. Conversely when you can tie big change to the organization situationally it energizes the organization that it is being smart <to not change everything>, but bold <in that it is willing to make selective smart big changes>. Showing both is the best of both worlds.
• The employee/individual: incrementalism is a virus almost like mononucleosis. It encourages employees to almost sleepwalk through the day. When you inject big change and encourage everyone to believe it can be done and develop a plan to show it can be done and activate people to start getting it done, individual employees are reminded that there IS something more than either the status quo or ‘incremental and gradual change’ <which they were struggling to discern from the everyday grind anyway>.

In the end. My concern.

My concern is that our love of incrementalism is killing meaningful change. Its killing meaningful decisions. Its killing believing meaningful (bigger) things can actually happen.

I don’t want to kill incrementalism, but I certainly want to breathe new life into “big” and meaningful.

Just know this about incrementalism: the problem is that incrementalism is seductively sleepy. It’s the Prozac of business strategy. All I can really suggest is that every business should stop taking Prozac on occasion and watch how the pulse of the company picks up. They may find that Life off of Prozac just isn’t that bad. More importantly, they may find they can shrug off the sadness of incrementalism and have a happier organization. And that is a good thing in business.

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They say it all breaks down to keeping your feet on the ground

My sole intention is keeping my head in the clouds

They say that I can’t last a day in the real world

I say you wouldn’t survive one night in mine

—

Asking Alexandria

===

I get businesses unstuck  (90% of the time that simply means helping them get out of their own way). That’s what I do. This discussion most typically revolves around Taleb’s concept of Antifragile. And while I find Nassim Taleb whipsmart trying to explain Antifragile in a pragmatic business sense, and business environment, is semi-impossible (or at least beyond my intellectual capabilities).

Suffice it to say almost every business I have ever interacted with has struggled with balancing, or applying proportionate effort, pragmatism and possibilities – standardized process and agility/vision to meet opportunities. Most businesses see them as binaries where I see them as malleable. Most businesses see them as an organism and I see them as molecular. That said. While I love conceptual discussions (and actually believe the future of business will be owned by the ones who can think conceptually) my job is to frame in the abstract and deliver in the concrete – balancing idealism and realism. I call it ‘’pragmatism and possibilities’ and suggest its all about having your feet in the clouds and head on the ground.

Suffice it to say that 99% of the best businesses have figured out how to successfully keep their feet in the clouds and their head on the ground.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know it looks like I got it twisted around, but I did not. Good businesses are always walking with the future in mind. Always traveling toward possibilities. Always seeking ‘what’s next.’

Good businesses are always closely listening to the drumbeat of the feet of what is happening around them. Ear to the ground insuring everyone in the business is keeping their head in the game today. I have called it mastering pragmatism & possibilities. But, in reality, it is the ability to have your feet in the clouds and head on the ground.

I tend to believe if more people thought about it this way businesses would actually manage their pragmatism better (i.e., maximize existing resources in an agile way), would have more hope (i.e., maximize opportunities that arise better) and achieve more possibilities than they could ever imagine.

You have to admit the current definition – feet on the ground & head in the clouds – just ain’t working that well these days. Businesses seem to be more woefully stagnant <albeit always ‘talking’ change> and have more despair and lack of hope with regard to actionable possibilities than ever.

Why? Well. I am sure I could invest dozens of pages sharing thoughts on why, but instead I will focus on what I would consider the intellectual aspects, i.e., what is going on in with our attitudes that affect our heads, how we think and how we approach these things.

** note: if one were to need a playbook on how to discuss pragmatism & possibilities with a business this is as good a place to start as any – deconstructing each issue.

• Issue one. over-simplification

Suffice it to say we have devolved into a society of sound bites. This is true in business even moreso. In business it seems to be all about simplicity. In everyday Life it is ‘summarize it for me’ or ‘oh, it’s simple <insert some explanation here>.’ In the end I can’t figure out if should be pointing the finger at us or them.

Them <management & leadership> because they think we are not capable of understanding some form of complexity and therefore they only offer up simplified versions of what needs to be communicated.

Or us <the employees> because we either:

<a> demand a sound bite under the guise of ‘we only have time for the headline’

<b> we only latch on to the fragment of the whole which we believe summarizes the whole.

Therefore I will point the finger at all of us and them. Here is a Truth.

Most things are just not that simple, in fact, they are complex. An effect can have multiple causes and a cause can have multiple effects. I say this despite the fact, naturally, we would like all the dominoes to line up one after another and when one falls the next naturally is impacted and falls. Causality is just an easier thing to grasp.

Well. Things don’t really work that way. Especially in a business environment. Maybe in a controlled test environment but, in business, events are typically bombarded from a variety of directions and while not all causes are created equal <some can impact more than others> most things are too complex to be simplified into ‘one thing.’ And, yet, we oversimplify again and again and again.

Over simplifying simply means ignoring complexities.

Over simplifying simply means being consciously ignorant.

Over simplifying … well … just doesn’t work in the long run.

It eases you through the moment only to have to doubly <or exponentially> invest energy later on. Let me put this as simply as I can: over simplification just doesn’t work.

Instead of dumbing things down to some simplistic sound bite we need to raise the level of general understanding & knowledge to the level of complexity of the ideas & systems in which a business works – in other words, unravel the complexity into understandable components. Factually, seconds of involvement <sound bites> versus minutes of involvement <deeper complex discussion> leads to degrees of real knowledge, i.e., seconds leads to shallow knowledge or let’s call it ‘less knowledgeable.’ Over simplification will not demystify uncertainty and cannot help us do what we really need to do — reconcepting & rethinking that which is (which is the portal to unlocking potential).

What I am suggesting is difficult and uncertain work. But certainly more satisfying and inspiring when we solve and recreate and it certainly is a more effective way to keep your feet in the clouds and head on the ground..

I can unequivocally state that the fate of possibilities for a business, any business, lies in balance if we don’t invest in the hard work of ‘non over simplification.’

And worse? We won’t solve any of the problems we face if we do not address this.

This leads me to …

• Issue two. being intellectually insightful is about hard work.

Let me begin by suggesting that good ideas cannot be decided by number of tweet votes in favor of. Business ideas do not compete on American Idol nor, frankly, should they compete in any larger group. We are not all judges <and probably shouldn’t be on American Idol either>.

Why? Good ideas are rarely popular; therefore, I don’t really want a business idea to win some meaningless popularity contest. If we really want to do what needs to be done to maximize both the pragmatism & the possibilities in business we have to hunker down and work hard … work hard in that we need to use what we have to rethink things … use all aspects including economic thought and philosophy and the past … all of which means dealing with ambiguity and contradiction.

And, yes, that is hard work. That is the kind of work that hones the intellectual insightfulness necessary to keep your feet in the clouds and your feet on the ground and, well, make progress. Smart progress.

Instead of dumbing things down we need to be raising the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us. And while you may balk at something like ‘intellectual insightfulness’ as too far reaching or ‘elitist’ … suffice it to say we just need to be smarter … less ignorant … more enlightened <open to additional thoughts> and more involved in the difficult and uncertain work of demystification and reconcepting ideas and systems in which we live in and … well … just plain rethinking shit.

Suffice it to say that there is nothing simple when talking about world-changing ideas … because talking will not simply make the world change.

I read somewhere recently that ‘if you remove this boundary … the only boundary left is our imagination.’

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Imagination is important, but even imagination is complicated and difficult and tends to not offer tidy solutions. Especially if you don’t invest in the hard work.

We need to be doing more of ‘using your imagination within the box of what exists.’ We don’t need to be wandering aimlessly ‘outside the box’ but rather using our imagination insightfully and creatively WITHIN the box and expand the boundaries.

It is all hard work, but hard work will work. And in this case I mean hard thinking work.

Simply ‘doing’ aint gonna cut it. We need to be smarter. And whether you think about thinking this way or not, it ain’t about staring off into space doing nothing <random dreaming>, thinking is a blue collar job. Thinking is all about work. Hmmmmmm … it is quite possible that what I just wrote defines “head on the ground” better than anything I have ever written before.

Anyway. As a corollary to issue number two …

• Issue three. innovation is not <just> technology.

What makes oversimplification even more challenging is that for some reason we seem to be associating innovation with technology … and just technology. We can’t … and shouldn’t.

This type of thinking leads us to possibly believe technology innovations will eventually solve all problems and maximize everyone’s Life as some point. That is a very dangerous idea.

It is dangerous because in reality if we focus just on technology as the solution we are actually preventing the real change we need. It’s a very dangerous idea because it completely removes the human aspect. I cannot tell people how often I need to remind everyone technology augments humans (if you seek potential & possibilities), not humans augmenting technology.

Regardless. Minds need to innovate too. Thinking and attitudes need to evolve and innovate. New thought systems, economic systems and systems in which people live eat and breath all need to evolve and that happens through innovation <whether technology is involved or not>. Technology is simply a path that runs parallel to culture <or society> basically amplifying everything that is happening on the parallel path <the corollary to that is … with nothing to amplify the technology remains silent>.

Technology and culture and people and business are entangled. Everything is connected with everything. Technologies may enable new ways of doing things as well as thinking. This effects culture so culturally we need to innovate to structure how those technologies will be involved in our lives <so that we can dictate a little how they are incorporated> and we need to innovate our thinking and culture so that we can actually impact how technology evolves <so that we can dictate how what technology is innovated in some form or fashion>.

At the moment it seems like we respond to technology rather than proactively drive technology. Yes. Technology has certainly dramatically improved the overall quality of business but, at some point, technology is not a reason for being, but rather simply an enabler for being. The paradox is that the system we have now may make amazing new technology possible, but at same time is creating such cultural conflict that maximizing technology ‘what could be’ seems impossible. We need to innovate the systems in which technology exists.

Economically, culturally and philosophically. All systems need to see innovation.

• Issue four. adaptability does not mean ‘no strategy’.

Businesses inherently like structure. They see structure as replicable (safe, efficient & maintaining whatever level of effectiveness they have currently attained). The problem is emphasizing structure, pragmatism, actually increases the fragility of a business (source: antifragile) and limits the scope/horizon view of pursuing possibilities. With a ‘feet on the ground’ philosophy structure & construct of resources/systems/process dictate the direction, velocity and vision of the business. In other words, pragmatism is the source of possibilities. If you flip the equation, pragmatism becomes the enabler of possibilities. This does not mean a business has no strategy, all it does is maximize flexibility & agility to pragmatically apply resources to possibilities as they arise. Taleb calls this AntiFragile, Toffler called it the polymalleable organization, HBR has called it “Agile”, I call it “feet in the clouds, head on the ground” or “managing pragmatism & possibilities.” Call it whatever you want but it is the issue a business needs to address in order to be successful in the future.

<that’s it for my issues>

Look.

Hope and possibilities grounded with enlightened pragmatism abound in today’s business world if you look hard enough <and have your feet in the clouds an head to the ground>. But none of it comes easy. These types of things are rarely just given, they need to be earned mostly thru hard work.

I don’t believe simplicity is bad.

I don’t believe being optimistic or having a positive attitude is bad.

I don’t believe technology is bad.

I don’t believe hard work, smartly done, is bad.

But we seem trapped in the old paradigm of “head in the clouds & feet on the ground.” This old paradigm kind of separates work & thinking <vision> in a non useful way. And I … well … I admit I sometimes think this paradigm encourages a slightly warped version of some lazy thinking.

And we cannot be lazy moving forward. And we certainly cannot afford to be lazy thinkers. For in this type of laziness lurks ignorance and it is ignorance we should fear. Not any ideological argument or technological innovation which inserts itself into our daily lives but ignorance.

Avoid lazy thinking. Maybe have everyone should hearken to Emerson’s words:

“Consent yourself to be an organ of your highest thought, and lo! suddenly you put all men in your debt, and are the fountain of an energy that goes pulsing on with waves of benefit to the borders of society, to the circumference of things.”

In the end.

Effective business has always been about applying the right resources at the right time against the right opportunity (or challenge). Period.

Efficient business has always been about applying resources in a consistent way all the time to be applied against the opportunities that exist. Period.

Agility resides in the optimization betwixt the two. Either, alone, is fragile. The fragile mixture, proportionate focus, of the two actually makes one Antifragile (stealing from Taleb). That said. A business is most likely able to find the optimal proportion by, well, keep their head to the ground and their feet in the clouds.

Consent yourself to be of your highest thought.

And how do you do that? Keep your feet in the clouds and your head on the ground. Be pragmatic and explore possibilities.

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Originally published September 2016

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“When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”

–

Bob Dylan

<although … ironically … the movie Titanic made this quote even more famous … “When you have nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.” said Jack Dawson>

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Well. In business having nothing is an entrepreneurial or ‘save the business’ type of discussion.

In Life? It’s not that cut & dried. Mainly because it is often a survival discussion. I say that especially after searching the web and finding a shitload of vapid “keep your chin up” type writing <and some horrendous writing at that>.

I am all for keeping a positive view or maintaining hope for things to be better and all that stuff … but let’s get to “ain’t got nothin’.”

I am going to offer two seemingly contradictory thoughts:

–          Nothing doesn’t come in one size. It comes in different degrees … maybe I should say that sometimes nothing still contains something. It’s just your point of view.

–          Nothing is a black hole. For everyone. When you are in the ‘aint got nothing’ hole it is simply a black hole <shallow or deep it is dark and a hole>.

–          Nothing and degrees.

Suffice it to say if you have nothing, and you have never had something, nothing looks very very different than if you have had something and now you have nothing.

This flies in the face of the baloney I found online that suggests everyone starts from nothing <although I have found a number of ‘life coaches’ who suggest this as a starting point for positive thinking>.

Rich people, poor people, successful people, non-successful people, top achievers, non-achievers do not start from the same place where they had nothing. While, factually, each of us builds our own achievements and knowledge, your environment can dictate a bunch of ‘something.’

Anyway. I read this somewhere.  Two things define your personality, the way you manage things when you have nothing & the way you behave when you everything. I like that thought. Mainly because I also believe this is based on your perspective … ‘everything’ to a middle class person is very different than ‘everything’ to someone currently in poverty. I say this because so often in my relatively comfortable middle class environment I hear far too many people talking about how people living in poverty squander money when they get it.

Well. If you have never had anything, you have no idea what it feels like to actually have something. Even if that ‘something’ is one steak dinner in the year. It may appear to be a massive misuse of funds available to someone who has something and yet it may be the momentary access to touch ‘hope’ to another group of people.

Regardless. The degrees in nothing is a combination of your environment, situation and attitude.

For example. If you feel attitudinally as if you have lost everything already. That you literally had nothing left to lose. Inevitably you will decide that nothing could be as worse as what you had already gone through.

This is a wiping the slate clean type nothing. But that is just one type of nothing. And on the way to that type of nothing you actually get to watch nothing coming down the road toward you. Painful but at least you see it coming.

So. I am not going to literally outline ever degree of nothingness.

Because all that really matters is if you feel like you have nothing to lose you only feel you only have everything to gain. In other words, there is nowhere to go but up.

By the way, while seemingly flippant that is a very very important thought.

Nowhere to go but up.

Frankly, my idea of bottom is most likely nowhere near what the true bottom is. I may feel like it is, I may feel it as close to a Life truth as one can get, but in my heart of hearts I know there is another degree of nothing below what I believe bottom is.

But. It’s my bottom. That is my ‘nothing’ in my pea like brain.

I do not believe I am that different from many people.

I tend to believe most of us define their own nothing differently than other people.

I say this point because that is why I believe it is so difficult to help someone who is in a nothing stage. Believing you have nothing to lose is most likely exactly what will make you successful. But we are prone to want to hold on to things, but once there is nothing to hold on to we have a tendency to dig deep … and realize that the only thing we can truly hold on to is something deeper and impenetrable inside us.

Let’s call that the survival instinct.

Here’s the tricky thing about survival and nothing. Those truly with nothing are better at surviving than someones who had something and lost it. In the end the people we need to worry about are the ones who have shitty survival instincts.

Yes. They can adapt <painfully I imagine>. But saying ‘do whatever it takes’ is significantly different than DOING ‘do whatever it takes.’

Hence the degrees in nothing.

Ok. My main point in breaking it out this way?

Someone close to the edge of ‘nothing’ needs help. It doesn’t matter what their degree of nothing is. Simplistically they need something more than what they have to survive — survive sometimes physically and sometimes emotionally.

At one point I have neared ‘nothing’ and I have to tell you — the feeling sucks. And you know what? The homeless guy who stands at the corner asking for money would probably laugh in my face if I described how close I was to nothing.

It’s all perspective. But it is all painful <and scary>.

Sometimes it may seem like we have not learned that everything comes at a price. Whatever your bottom in nothing is the price is tenacity and strength and resilience to move past a ‘nothing’ stage in life.

Think about that before you judge someone’s actions with regard to ‘having nothing.’

–          Nothing is a black hole.

Many many people suggest that ‘nothing’ is not really a true concept because we all have something … that undying and eternal part of us called our spirit.

In fact I found where some woman named Libba Bray said something like:

“there’s no such thing as nothing. In every nothing, there’s a something. In fact, there could be everything!”

<apparently she even said it with an exclamation point>

Well. What a bunch of bullshit.

When it is in your head ‘I have nothing’ is as real as the ground you stand on. In fact, nothing is something, it is a black hole that has sucked <or is in the process of sucking> every ounce of hope or dream you have.

“From where you are you can hear their dreams. The dismays and despairs and flight and fall and big seas of their dreams. “

Dylan Thomas

C’mon Bruce … really? Dreams and hope?

Oh, we tend to believe there is so much hope it can never run out. So much hope as that.

Well. If you are one of those who believe that, you have never truly had nothing.

Nothing is … well … nothing. It is the abyss that contains no hope. It has been emptied of dreams and wishes and hope and all that remains is blackness … and the despair that comes with no light <at the end of any tunnel>.

Here’s the good news.

There are not many people in this hole <albeit I would suggest any is too many>.

My point? If you believe you have nothing, sometimes it is difficult to think about something like “I have nothing to lose.” Maybe because in the darkness of nothing you already think you have lost.

Feeling like ‘when you have nothing’ is a really bad feeling. Shit. Even if you start inching toward nothingness it is a bad feeling. It is such a bad feeling it is tough to listen to ‘feel good’ tripe as a way out of the hole.

Just remember that.

When you hear someone suggest they have nothing, before you start pointing out all the ‘something’ in their lives, remember attitudinally they may truly believe they have nothing. So offer them something meaningful <note: easier said than done>.

Ok. Look. Having nothing means you have nothing to lose.

It provides some freedom, but probably not as much freedom as ‘positive life coaches’ would have you believe.

But. It is freedom if you can find it within the dark of the nothingness.

“Nothing, Everything, Anything, Something: If you have nothing, then you have everything, because you have the freedom to do anything, without the fear of losing something.” 

Jarod Kintz,

In Life, positive thinking platitudes aside, nothing is scary. It can feel debilitating and in some situations it IS debilitating.

I end with that thought because I simply don’t believe, attitudinally, you can truly do “what would you do if you had nothing to lose.”

You simply cannot envision it unless you have actually brushed against the darkness of nothingness. Even a light touch of nothingness leaves a scar you will never forget. And once you have the scar, trust me, you will never have to ‘act like you have nothing to lose and make a decision.’

You will know exactly what to do and how to think.

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“When you ain’t got nothin’, you got nothin’ to lose.”

–

Bob Dylan

<although … ironically … the movie Titanic made this quote even more famous>

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Well. Most of us have something. Which means we have something to lose.

Now. We may have had a glimpse of ‘having nothing’ and possibly even had nothing at some point, but I would argue most of us truly have never hit bottom.

Come close? Sure. Maybe.

I know I have. But until you truly have had nothing, absolutely nothing, you have always had something to lose.

Which leads us to have expectations. And expectations are tricky things. Expectations seem to rear its ugly head most when you begin thinking you already have something <and, well, you actually DO have something>.

I was reminded of this topic once again when I spoke with a small company who wanted to discuss ‘rebranding’ themselves. After some talking I believe we all realized they didn’t really need to rebrand, they simply needed to remind themselves of when they had nothing. As in .. when they first started their company. They needed to refind their original ‘mojo.’ Refind the ‘nothingness’ they initially embraced to believe in themselves and create something <from that nothing>.

As time had gone on their successes made them wander from who they were when they first opened their business.

Now.

Sure.

We all mature and learn as we experience more and more, but when you first start a company you typically have some ideals and ideas. Those ideals and ideas are 99.9% of the time transferable to when your business plateaus <which is natural> and you want to move to the next level.

I say that as I see so many business people benchmarking and casting about “what the market wants’ and trends and a whole bunch of other mumbo jumbo <albeit often good things just to check on>.

More often these same people would find their time used more productively by simply refreshing their original ideals and ideas. By refreshing I don’t mean ‘redoing’ or ‘rebranding’, but simply pulling them out of the drawer, reminding what they were, blow the dust off of them and make sure they remain the corner stone(s) to whatever may be planned for the future.

But.

Once again.

Expectations are tricky things.

Then you had nothing.

Now you have something.

And we justify changing or redirecting off the infamous “well … I have learned a lot since then.”

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Mostly you learned that your ideals and ideas were solid. But sometimes you had to wrap them around some tactical ‘doing’ shit you just never envisioned you would be faced with when you got up and running. Sometimes a business naturally grows in complexity as it it grows <contrary to popular belief ‘scale’ is rarely even or simple>.

Running a business is hard.

Growing a business is hard.

Sometimes we expect too much.

It also sometimes seems like the key is to just expect nothing and then that one time when you’re not all caught up in thinking about what you really want to happen, it will.

Well. In business there are a shitload of people who don’t like that last thought.

“It will just happen.”

Yikes.

Business people don’t like that looking forward <what’s the plan and how are we going to – specifically – achieve it>.

And they don’t even like it looking backwards <wow, that was good, it couldn’t have just happened though … what specifically can we attribute it to?>.

I am certainly not suggesting business based on faith. Because a ‘build it and it will come” business ideology is doomed for failure 99% of the time.

However. I am suggesting that if you stay the course with solid ideals <of what you want> and solid ideas <what you believe is the right thing to do> that more times than not “it will just happen” and you will not be able to specifically point to one thing that made it happen <other than maybe your ideals and ideas of course>.

Anyway. I read this somewhere: two things define your personality, the way you manage things when you have nothing & the way you behave when you everything.

I like that thought. I like that thought for Life in general, but really like it for business leaders.

Oh. Many people misread this discussion.

This discussion is NOT about risking everything. It is simply just thinking about ‘what would you do if you had nothing’ businesswise.

Because what that leaves you with is your character and doing things you want to do and saying things you want to say.

And you can look at nothing several ways.

In thinking long term … your vision for your company or ‘who you are’ as a company … or simply in making decisions within the moment. As Mr. Magorium suggested … “you can live a lifetime in 37 seconds.”

In business.

Sometimes I think all you need is 37 seconds of insane courage.

Just literally 37 seconds of just embarrassing bravery.

To paraphrase that incredibly bad movie ‘little black book’ … “in that 37 seconds I believe we have the ability to write our own stories.

And each time we think we know the end, we don’t. Perhaps luck exists somewhere between the world of planning, of chance and in the peace that comes from knowing that you just can’t know it all. Life’s funny that way… once you let go of the wheel, you might end up right where you belong.

Regardless. Thinking like you have nothing.

Most people may not like the actual feeling of having nothing but they liked who they were when they had nothing. Having things is nice, really nice, but it can clutter your thinking.

Think like you have nothing. It is a good business practice.

Mostly because while you may look at all the dollars and cents you have accumulated inevitably you will end up looking back on HOW you made all those dollars and cents. As Wonder Years reminds us:

“You start out life with a clean slate.

Then you begin to make your mark.

You face decisions, make choices.

You keep moving forward. But sooner or later there comes a time where you  look back over where you have been … and wonder who you really are.”

The Wonder Years

Ah. Looking back or looking backwards. I tend to not like doing this and I tend to rarely suggest a business do so excepting with some very specific situations and needs. Maybe I could say it better by suggesting we not look back at the horizon, but at specifics — specific events, times, places & words. Seek out something very very specific. Like when you had nothing for example.

Anyway. This was some shared thinking for businesses, but I imagine components are relevant to Life in general.

What I mean by that is, in business or in personal Life, if you practice thinking like you have nothing I promise you will look back someday and never wonder who you really are.

Who you have become will simply be a reflection of who you are and not of ‘things’ or anything you have accumulated.

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“We laughed and laughed, together and separately, out loud and silently, we were determined to ignore whatever needed to be ignored, to build a new world from nothing if nothing in our world could be salvaged, it was one of the best days of my life, a day during which I lived my life and didn’t think about my life at all.”

―

Jonathan Safran Foer

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Someone (Gerad Petherbridge) recently asked what makes a great advertising agency culture. I flippantly answered “an uncompromising vision to do great, smart, work.” And you know what? I stand by that. And I stand by that not just for advertising but for pretty much any business. To me, that is the core of a principled culture. I’d wrap two other principles around that:

• Progress (better today than I was yesterday).
• Integrity (no ethical shortcuts).

Note I have not used the word “values” yet. I will not in this frame of reference <but I will in a different frame later>.

A culture, or community of people working together, or maybe better said, the things that create a well-connected, group of people tend to be bonded in a more nebulous vision. Shangri-La, values, principles, attitudes, whatever labels you want to attach (and there are gobs of people and books and coaches who will) that we always want to identify, evaluate and ‘formula-ize’ even though it is actually something that’s actually more magic in a bottle. Yeah. Shangri la as it were.

I would suggest all those labels are just stupid shit.

That doesn’t mean there are into underlying practices that can facilitate a consistent desired output, but it means you really cannot create it; you simply create scenarios in which it can occur/emerge.

I will say my opening one sentence paragraph may be my definition for togetherness & my definition of the best business culture one could imagine. It captures the essence of what togetherness should be for everyone perfectly. It embodies culture. This is what a well aligned business focused on a similar vision & purpose should feel like. I find it interesting because I believe we now this in our youth and the as we forge our way thru the business world we get stripped of this, what I would call the substance, in our pursuit of ‘getting shit done’ & ROI & results.

“People are energy sources to be activated, not depleted, to maximize businesses. We flippantly discuss jobs as mundane and boring which only makes the people doing them feel meaningless and mundane.”

Bruce McTague

Many people smarter than I have discussed meaning of work and the fact people want to work toward something, not just for something (like money).

To me this is about a vision which everyone gathers around. I call it a campfire.

The odd thing to me with the campfire concept is that it implies a bit of “thoughtful gathering of fuel to build a campfire” (some purposeful planning & thinking) and, I will admit, as a leader I never really thought much about purposefully sharing any real substantive value to the people who elected to follow me nor do I purposefully share any substantive value to people I wanted to join whatever merry band gathered around that campfire. I never thought about trying to create some compelling message or try and be compelling. I solely focused on my convictions, my attitude & beliefs and I imagine I thought of it as “I have a campfire, come sit down … and I hope you stay <if you want>.”

Ok. This leads me to Values.

My POV: a business does not have values, they have principles. People have values, individual to themselves, and tey bring them to work every day and a business places principles at the front door so the people can coalesce their behavior around those principles.

Beyond the fact Values statements do not define behavior tossing around values in a flippant fashion seeds an organization with cynicism.

But here is most possibly the toughest challenge developing a business Principle ‘campfire’ — it takes a leader group with real guts. Why? The thing is that Principles have the uncomfortable task of encouraging personal & organizational success all the while fettering how success is achieved. Let’s call Principles the reins you tug and release on the organization.

Why does that matter? Well. As Napoleon said: “Success is the most convincing talker in the world.”

Success, in and of itself, is the one thread wish holds together almost every organization. We can discuss purpose and we can discuss integrity but, in the end, the function of an organization is to be successful.

And success is a cat’s cradle clash of personal versus the organization.

This is where I bring in ‘empathy’ and ‘mirroring.’

Empathy is a connection between feelings. Its strongest connection is when one’s feelings toward another mirror what the other is actually feeling. Let’s call it empathy alignment.

But.

——-

“Mirroring alone does not lead to empathy. We still have to choose to believe another person’s feelings matter.”

The Anatomy of Empathy

——–

If someone’s personal employee identity is defined by the culture, the principles of the culture need to be aligned not only with the personal values, but also the success value or it all gets negated, wiped out, and makes the employee feel lost, maybe isolated and, at its worst, feel less worthy as a person <questioning not only hier abilities but also how they are going about using their abilities>.

Then there is the organization itself. Success and identity <values> clash in a fear of being cast out from the collective <either by being fired or by not fitting in>.

Humans are tribal by nature and organizational culture feeds into that <and principles are maybe the key aspect of foundational culture aspects>. Obeying principled behavior, even if you have differing individual values, is the price to pay for staying in the tribe. In exchange you get to enjoy the perks, protection and personal actualization found within the organization.

Lastly. In the end.

Here is the most powerful aspect of culture.

Employees are greatest advocates for what they believe in. And. The holy grail of the ‘future of work’ is having employees (people) believe in themselves & believe they offer value every day. Brands <what you sell or just simply the company you work for> reside in minds of customers. Employees just show people what they can believe in. In other words. Productivity increases in tandem with greater brand/business value <a version of the Halo Effect>. So if the employees produce great work imbued with integrity and people like it and find value in it you have created a loop of highest value.

I admit I worry about wording it this way because inevitably some business person will think “how do I measure that and motivate that” when the power in this is only measured in the looped feedback mechanism. Ponder.