Divergence From 75%
My journey as a writer has always been a parallel path to my world as someone who fixes companies for a living and does a very good job of it. The two have had a cross relationship and this site shows the split trajectory between the two worlds. I spend about a quarter of my day writing, and I’ll write all day on many weekends. About 90% is business related, based on four decades of experience running companies of various sizes to find that optimum balance point between shareholders, employees, customers and suppliers. The more I write, the more I feel the disconnect between the two worlds; business and writing about other topics. Left versus right brain.
Often, when I’m working on a solution for a company, it typically involves internally shuffling the deck in some way. Moving people into the right seat on the bus, or out of the company entirely, or bringing in someone with more experience and better results. I hate firing anyone, but some people can be a root cause that prevents a company from becoming successful.
My work is a bit like fighting cancer. Of course, those who don’t want change or feel the impact, are looking for a way to stop my progress or discredit me and my work in some way. It’s normal. I’m not out to ruin anyone’s life, but I do believe that some companies fail precisely because they have people who are not good at their jobs. It doesn’t make it their fault, but it almost doesn’t matter. They are failing, and thus the whole company is in a pickle.
In all my years doing my work, never once have I been hired to squeeze that last nickel out of a company. It’s not what I do. Usually when I come in, it’s to solve a specific set of problems. I never assume to know the root cause of the problems until I get to talking to employees and see what they know and how they operate within their roles. Of course I look for patterns because I see so many.
I’ll sit and wonder, where is all of this taking me? One thing about writing is that the more you work at it, the more it pushes you into a world of ideas and thoughts that are even more complicated to explain as you push through the science of your career. I try at times to explain it, then end up deleting everything I wrote because I wasn’t coming remotely close to the idea. It then circles back to, how can I be good at writing if I can’t explain what I’m writing about? I think it’s the line between the conscious and unconscious and taking something three dimensional and explaining it linear. If I decide someone is bad at their job, how I do I confirm it? How do I know my solution is the right one? Some comes from experience, but it’s never enough, so I’m always looking for different evidence, one way or another. I’m in deep pattern recognition in the pursuit of perfection. I always make a strong commitment to everything I do.
Over twenty years ago now, I was helping someone with their career who claimed to want success very badly in their particular industry. By all appearances, their words and actions matched. They seemed dedicated to their work and they had core talent. All of the ingredients were in place. Yet, I saw they were failing and I knew why. It was a lack of willingness to refine and improve their work, as a continuous process, of create, recreate, refine, over and over until perfection.
When I spoke up about how their course of action couldn’t possibly lead to the outcome they wanted, and how I had to stop enabling them on that flawed course, we abruptly stopped talking. After over twenty years from that conversation, we’ve never spoken again. It was a painful outcome for me. I wanted them to be a success, but I was worn out. To them, I was nothing more than a resource to get by, and I realized it over time.
By pure accident, we ran into each other at a trade show in Chicago of all places, and that was awkward. After pleasantries, I didn’t stick around to continue the conversation as I know how this person would perceive anything I said. They were exactly where I predicted they would be if they failed. I was witnessing the very outcome I wanted them to avoid.
After I originally parted ways with my friend, I got into a long conversation about two years later with Allan Katz as we talked about what made a good actor. Allan said that what makes acting so hard, is that you have to make a 100% commitment to the character or you’re spotted as a shitty actor. I thought about that for a long time. Some actors are paid massive sums, because it’s a very difficult art, because that 100% commitment is so difficult to achieve. Bad acting is easy to spot. Good acting doesn’t look like acting at all because of commitment.
With this friend, that 100% commitment to the outcome didn’t exist. There was a 75% commitment at best and no more. It was like venture backing a dud. You don’t sustain additional investment. You stop throwing good money after bad and that’s what I did. That small act of changing direction, had a profound impact on my future and while I regret the loss of a friend, I don’t regret the decision. I wanted to live a life with 100% commitment to something.
I’ve often wondered what would have happened if I sustained that bad course, just as I do now with clients who don’t want to face the reality of their circumstances. I don’t want to support a 75% commitment with anyone. I know it won’t end well, but it wears me out trying to convince them otherwise. Like the old friend, we typically end up parting ways and the company or project never recovers.