This short-term response to long-term desires is alive and well in the corporate world also. A management consultant friend of mine was hired by a billion-dollar company to help it fulfill its goals and aspirations. The problem was, she explained, no matter the issue, the company’s managers were always drawn to the quicker, cheaper option over the better long-term solution. Just like the habitual dieter, “they never have the time or money to do it right the first time,” she said of her client, “but they always have the time and money to do it again.”
-Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek
Tag Archives: Planning
Decisions and Design
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There is a wonderful story of a group of American car executives who went to Japan to see a Japanese assembly line. At the end of the line, the doors were put on the hinges, the same as in America. But something was missing. In the United States, a line worker would take a rubber mallet and tap the edges of the door to ensure that it fit perfectly. In Japan, that job didn’t seem to exist. Confused, the American auto executives asked at what point they made sure the door fit perfectly. Their Japanese guide looked at them and smiled sheepishly. “We make sure it fits when we design it.” In the Japanese auto plant, they didn’t examine the problem and accumulate data to figure out the best solution—they engineered the outcome they wanted from the beginning.
Every instruction we give, every course of action we set, every result we desire, starts with the same thing: a decision. There are those who decide to manipulate the door to fit to achieve the desired result and there are those who start from somewhere very different. Though both courses of action may yield similar short-term results, it is what we can’t see that makes long-term success more predictable for only one. The one that understood why the doors need to fit by design and not by default.
-Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action, Simon Sinek
Practical Pessimism
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“We might be accused of being a tad pessimistic. In fact, that is not entirely true, because while we do believe that we could, at any moment, lose our incomes and end up destitute, we also believe in ourselves enough to be confident that our jobs are not our only source of support. And that attitude is, ultimately, what led us to our current lifestyle. Seeing what was happening, we decided to not allow circumstance to force us into a situation where we might have to make that very difficult decision between feeding ourselves and having a place to live.”
–Browsing Nature’s Aisles: A Year of Foraging for Wild Food in the Suburbs by Wendy Brown and Eric Brown
The Myth of Overnight Success
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“Overnight success is a myth. Dig into almost every overnight success story and you’ll find about a decade’s worth of hard work and perseverance. Building a substantial body of work takes a long time—a lifetime, really—but thankfully, you don’t need that time all in one big chunk. So forget about decades, forget about years, and forget about months. Focus on days.”
–Show Your Work!: 10 Ways to Share Your Creativity and Get Discovered by Austin Kleon
Planning is not for Camping
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As I prepare for my luxurious summer vacation (camping in the woods), I give you this:
“I don’t like plans. They get in the way of everything else“
–Gold Runner: A Novella of Goblins, Theft, and Teenage Gods (United States of Asgard) by Tessa Gratton
Defense and Fear
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“But they refused to develop a plan for how to defend the village against attack, since it would have required them to explain the danger to the Ashawala’i people. “When you are old,” they said to Zanja, “You will understand. Now, it is difficult for you to see how easily that which is right and good can be changed, and how difficult it is to change it back again. You say that our people are endangered by these Sainnites. But you do not see that fearing the Sainnites would endanger them even more certainly.”
–Fire Logic (Elemental Logic)