Pragmatic Dictator

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all..

One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.

The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence,empathy, generosity, truth, compassion and faith.”

The grand son thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather: “Which wolf wins?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

[With thanks to Dave Zaffery for pointing me at this]

Technorati Tags: personal, philosophy

Quick wins are all about proving a point in short order. Small effort big results, big bang for little buck, low hanging fruit and so on.

But there’s surely a limit to what can be done? How fast do we need to deliver something for it to qualify as a quick win? At some point don’t we need to get strategic because we’ve grabbed up all the low hanging fruit and now have to work harder and longer?

Does it make sense to ask for a quick win to prove a long-term strategy? Any quick win will surely have limited if not zero immediate benefit because only with a reasonable amount of your strategy implemented could you expect tangible results? How would you measure what limited effect there is anyway? More significantly there has to be a risk that the pressure to provide quick wins actually damages your ability to pursue long term strategy. For example, you might end up constantly undoing what you’ve already done to take the next quick step because you cut corners last time. Pretty soon you’re undoing so much because you cut so many corners that you come to a halt.

I have this feeling that quick wins are kind of like nibbling at fruit bars and Red Bull whilst you work flat out to complete a project. Eventually you’re going to need to stop, cook a proper meal and sleep. You’ll probably need to go to the doctor too – consequences of a none-too-nutritious diet. You got that project done but at what cost long term?

Focusing on quick wins is surely just storing up pain for later. How much does it have to hurt before we stop trying for quick wins and get strategic? Would we even be aware of the pain? How do we become aware of this nasty aching? Do we maybe not bother pushing strategy until it hurts so bad that we have no choice but to take a risk and try something new we can’t predict?

Maybe there’s something in the air as Doug McClure’s been independently pondering similar questions.

Technorati Tags: business, philosophy, strategy

There’s been a lot of stuff going on of late, I certainly feel brighter than I have done in some time. It just takes time to work through things, gain perspective and come to conclusions.

But some things never really get “closed out”. Some things you look back at and wonder if they really were as good as you thought at the time. Were they really worth the effort or did they cost you dearly in subtle ways you didn’t notice? Were they real or simply a function of over-optimism, daring to dream and a little too much rose tinting of shades? Would I have been better off if it had never been?

“What if?”, “why did I bother?”, “was it worth it?”, “why can’t I let it go?”.

Are such things important? Who knows?

Technorati Tags: philosophy, personal

If we’ve been doing something one particular way and it’s not leading to success there’s only one answer:

Do something different.

But is this true? What if the current approach is the best?

What does it matter if it’s still a failure?

If what we’re doing currently isn’t successful, do we really have anything to lose by trying another approach? In the worst case, the new approach is as much or more of a failure than the old but there’s no change in the big picture – we’re still failing.

Should we be fearful of failure? Not at all, so long as we recognise it’s happening, learn the lessons and move on to something new. The alternative is to deny reality, inventing illusions to support our continued failure. The former leads to progress, the latter is a paranoid life running away from anything that threatens our “unreality bubble” whilst hurting those around us.

Technorati Tags: philosophy