Deciding to be a hare or a hound
One of Aesop’s lesser-known fables is the story of the hound and the hare. A hound startles a hare, which bolts from its lair and the hound gives chase. Eventually the hound gives up, at which point, a goat-herd taunts him for letting the hare get away, to which the dog replies “The difference is: I was only running for my lunch; the hare was running for his life.”
A vast number of British businesses are facing unprecedented challenges, not just now, but for the next few years. Challenges like rapidly changing customer behaviour, Brexit uncertainties suppressing demand, the rising cost of imports, increasingly aggressive competition, recruitment difficulties and a potential shortage of labour, to name but a few.
Against each of these challenges there are things that can be done: improving service and relationships, increasing value and differentiation, innovating new growth areas, accelerating employee development, raising productivity, redesigning the supply chain and so on. And yet, as the challenges continue to bite into their industries, many businesses will struggle to make the cut; not for a lack of potential solutions, but for a lack of decisiveness and pace in committing to, and implementing them. Indeed, any business that hasn’t worked through these scenarios, and isn’t already committed to changes that will enable it to thrive in that future, will be lucky to get through it intact.
Next week I’m revisiting the CEO of a business whom I first met three months ago. We’d been introduced by an email from a previous client, and we agreed to meet within a week. After an hour of conversation, she asked if I could stay longer, and invited her Business Development Director into the room. We agreed objectives, set a budget, that evening I wrote up a proposal and the following day they signed it. Within a month we’d had two full-day workshops with the team, redefined their customer strategy, their product and service portfolio, their organisational structure, and their approach to the market. Two weeks later they landed two new customers, more than paying for my work with them, and now, two months on, they’re ahead of budget for the year and on track to double their annual profit within the next 18 months. They were an absolute joy to work with: decisive and committed, and in the context of an extremely challenging market, they will absolutely succeed.
While I’m in London, I’ll also be meeting with two other CEOs, both of whom I’ve been in contact with for over six months, and both of whom are wrestling with the idea of spending money on external advice. I know from email exchanges that both are still struggling to define and engage the changes they know their businesses need, and performance is suffering as a result. But I also know that, even if they do decide to invite me in to help them, their success won’t come anything like as swiftly as my other client – their propensity for indecision is unlikely to change simply by signing on a dotted line.
Timeless as it may be, there’s a flaw in the fable of the hound and the hare. The hound says it’s only running for its lunch, but if it keeps missing its lunch, it will eventually lack the energy to run at all. If motivation is the essential ingredient that differentiates the hound’s performance from that of its quarry, the sooner it takes motivation from the spectre of long-term starvation, the better.
Those two CEOs, who’ve procrastinated while the third has been succeeding, weren’t in any more comfortable a position, either financially or competitively, and they certainly aren’t now. But like Aesop’s hound, they’ve yet to recognise the importance of committing while they still have the capacity and energy to act, and they’ll probably still be ruminating on their decision, while someone else is eating their metaphorical lunch.
So what scenarios have you worked through about the challenges heading your way, how decisive have you been, and what changes are you committed to in order to fit yourself for that future?