A good friend recently hosted me at London’s historic Reform Club for a talk by Anthony Seldon, a historian and commentator who writes books, inter alia, on British prime ministers. Approaching his zillionth book, alongside a full-time academic role, an audience member asked him how he could find time to be such a prolific writer. He quoted the late Steven Covey, “begin with the end in mind,” and shared how he forms a picture of the book in detail long before he puts pen to paper.
So how does that relate to the business world we are all part of? Well, it struck me how it’s a New Year and a new P&L. Whether 2023 brought good or bad bonuses, there’s a new plan, a clean slate, and fresh optimism for what’s possible in 2024. Yet most of those plans have been built in precisely the opposite mindset. Rather than starting with the external
possibilities and the untapped potential, they are all built on what happened last year with nips and tucks. A little more here, a little less there. With a couple of hero initiatives laid on top and the integration of many disparate corporate initiatives. It’s an efficient process as it allows a lot of detailed targets to be set with great apparent confidence and cascaded at all levels to “align” the organization. Tremendously efficient but what about effective? Or imaginative? Or impactful?
Great things are not born from incrementalism. Business transformations are rooted in untapped potential with new activity systems designed to pursue the new path. Thinking, acting, working, resourcing… differently. The illusion of safety from stability in a fast-changing world just leads to ever more detailed explanations of the inevitable variances. Channel the New Year optimism into thinking differently about your potential. Push your teams to have a point of view on the future and explore and design a way to position yourself to take advantage of that future. None of us came into business to simply do maintenance work. Like our predecessors and brand founders, we hoped to achieve great things. The stories that inspire us had invention and market development ingrained in very simple, coherent strategies that pursue powerful, often singular, ideas to full potential. Don’t settle for iterating past performance. Manage for potential.