By
Steven M. Worth President, Plexus Consulting Group, LLC
“There
is a tide in the affairs of men. Which,
taken at the flood, leads on to fortune…”
as Shakespeare noted nearly four hundred years ago; and this has been a popular
theme throughout the ages in both popular fiction as well as, in recent years,
business management books. In his book
Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell points out the interesting statistics behind most
outstanding success stories. His thesis
is so compelling that one might be tempted to conclude that “success” is an odds game—the
result of being in the right place at the right time and putting in the right
amount of prep time—much like
the Peter Seller’s movie “Being There” or the Tom Hanks movie ‘Forrest Gump”
in which the leading characters of both movies achieve astounding success in
life due to well-placed values and being in the right place at the right
time. Cinderella-tales are comforting. We see justice rendered in otherwise hopeless
situations—the way we rejoice
in the news of jackpot lottery winners, imagining that with luck this might one
day be us….
We see less of this magic in our work as management
consultants. What we see more often is
the truism that successful people and organizations are those who do what the
less successful don’t
do. By this I mean they do market
research, they develop strategic partnerships with outside groups and
organizations, they take calculated risks and encourage innovative thinking,
they retire programs and organizational structures that have outlived their
usefulness, and they focus their resources with laser-like intensity on those
programs and projects that are designed to meet current and future market
needs. We also see the hard work, the
agony of failure along with the courage to get up and go at it again, and the
humility in knowing that no one can do it all or know it all and that success
comes in working in harness with others who share your vision.
What we sometimes fail to see behind the news coverage
and trappings of success are what Winston Churchill in another time called the “blood, toil, sweat and tears” of success. This is unfortunate, because so many are
ready to throw in the towel at the first sign of an obstacle. The late psychiatrist and best-selling author
Scott Peck noted in his book The Road Less Travelled that the majority of his
patients were people who felt they were failures, or who built their lives
around avoiding failure without realizing how much easier it would be if they
just recognized that difficulty and uncertainty are not signs of failure but
rather normal and expected challenges on the path of success.
Strategic planning consists in part of recognizing which
aspects of your environment you control and which represent external trends
over which you have no control but which can present opportunities or threats
that you should take into account in your planning processes. As can be seen in our firm’s recent management survey,
increasing numbers of managers are using strategic planning as a tool for
planning their organization’s
success—a tool that is only
useful if it is fact-based and backed by a business plan that focuses resources
and sets long term and short term measurable goals. It works, but it does require work and risk
and letting go of preconceived notions.
This is the furious peddling that goes on under the graceful swan’s seemingly effortless glide
through the water.
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