Keeping One Hand On The Wheel

It’s the subject of a best-selling self-improvement book and a classic question all must face: Will what got you here keep you here (if you’re happy with where you are) or get you there (if you yearn for something else)?

Now, these are two different cases and must be examined separately, but let’s address the happy-with-where-I-am-and-want-to-stay scenario. It is in this case where the “Who Move My Cheese” message is most illustrative. You’ve found a cheese station (which represents your way of doing things or your style of leadership) and you’re quite happy there. At this station, you regularly find an ample pile of cheese (your duties and responsibilities, pay, satisfaction, or however you want to think of it) and happily go about your business whistling while you work.

One day, you think you notice your pile getting smaller, but you’re not sure — the reduction is minimal if at all. A few months later, you’re pretty sure the pile is smaller but you can’t quite trust your memory. After about a year, you are positive the pile is getting smaller and smaller. The obstacle to doing something about it, however, is your persistent faith that the methodology which yielded the cheese in the first place will, should or must start working again. After all, it had yielded the pile, and it doesn’t make sense that something which had worked — if carried out with scrupulous attention to detail — would suddenly stop working.

You question your ability at this time, or at this age, or after so long, to come up with an equally successful way of making cheese. You want the old way to just keep working or start working again.

But ahh, here is where your thinking has erred — the variables have not remained the same, for you do not control the whole ecosystem in which you operate. Any number of them may be different now, and if your pile is smaller, one or more most assuredly are.

Here are some of those possible variables:

• Your competitors are adding value to their offerings
• Your customers are recalibrating what they see as valuable
• The time horizon to produce results had shortened dramatically
• Government intrusion and mandates means you no longer get to make important strategic decisions

So you find yourself at an important crossroads. You have lived in a nice groove (next to a wonderfully supplied cheese station), but the supplies are dwindling. Is the idea that “what got you here will not get you there” too frightening to contemplate? Is the idea of reinventing yourself too intimidating to grapple with? I hope not, for it is in the answering of this question that your future will be defined — that you will either find salvation or destruction.

Change is constant — but the type of change required by you to survive will depend on how closely you’ve been observing your total ecosystem. If closely, if your hand never leaves the wheel, change will be incremental, manageable, absorbable; if not, it will be drastic, jarring and destructive. You pilot an ocean liner, not a speedboat, so plan turns accordingly.

If you are observant enough to tinker around the edges, you never need to violently overhaul the core of what you do or who you are. But to eschew change, to fear it, to assume that the recipe for success remains unchanged is a pipe dream, a lovely but false chimera.

There is no alternative to accepting the need to adapt, to evolve. Because if you don’t, you might look one day and find a very small pile of cheese.