What’s My Line?
I’ll be towing it forever
My wife bought me a weekend at race car driving school several years ago and the instructor was telling us about the line. The line is the optimum path for a car, making it possible to brake the hardest, take turns at the highest speed and get to the finish line first. It’s a combination of physics, physics and physics.
Of course, some of the Type As in the class were looking for alternatives, suggesting the kind of brilliant ideas that can only come from people who have never actually done the job. And all the instructor said, again and again, is: “The line is the line.” He was right, of course. No driver can stick to the line 100% of the time, but any driver who could achieve that goal would amass one heck of a winning percentage.
There is another word we can use to describe the line. That word is: reality. Too frequently, business leaders will waste precious energy arguing with that reality.
Harry’s not really producing as a sales rep, but if I give him one more deadline, he’ll change. Agnes has never been a team player, but this new project will convince her to change her work habits. Joan never alerts us to problems until it’s too late, but this new spreadsheet will solve the problem.
And even as we are arguing with the way things really are, we can’t avoid knowing that Harry isn’t going to respond to the same deadlines he didn’t meet before, Agnes is simply a toxic employee who should have pursued other ventures a long, long time ago, and Joan doesn’t alert us to problems because she doesn’t recognize them as such.
I spend too much time talking with people about the same issues we discussed last year or the year before that. With some of these people, I anticipate the same discussions a year from now, because it’s easier to talk about the problems than to fix them. Except, of course, that if you add up all the time spent talking about these issues, we’d save a lot of time by simply facing facts and moving on to more productive pursuits.
Of course, that’s just my opinion. What do you think?
Of course, that’s just my opinion. What do you think?
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