johnmaconline

Last week, I sat in a waiting room for what felt like an unusually long time.

You’ve been there. For each type of waiting room you sit in, you have a built-in “how long feels right” clock in your head cemented through years of experience and redundancy. If you get called before that time, you’re delighted. If it takes longer, you’re annoyed.

OK, so I’m annoyed, and I’ve left my phone in the car.

There’s some random TV in the corner across the room, but honestly, what’s TV? Who could possibly care about or engage with the moving pictures spewing forth from that thing? It could be a benign fixer-upper show or some ad trying to make me a better man through chemistry. Hard to tell.

I scout the end tables for an interesting magazine. In pre-phone days, I never minded sitting in waiting rooms that offered interesting magazines. Sports Illustrated, Time, and Outside were my gotos. Thoughtful and well-crafted journalism, storytelling, and writing in general. Good magazine articles served a niche between the newspaper and narrative non-fiction and comprised the important pieces of both. I both learned and felt something. Sometimes, while engrossed in a good magazine article, I’d be disappointed when they called my name.

But nothing here. Not one magazine. There’s a few pharma advertising cards laying around, but that’s it. Oh, maybe there’s a rack in a central location. Nope.

I miss magazines in waiting rooms.

Locks are impervious to us mere mortals — the front door people.

But not for a locksmith.

In today’s complex world, the systems we’ve been trained to use and guide our procedural living look impervious.

My credit card didn’t work.
I can’t get into the website.
The website won’t let me do that.
The curriculum says I have to take this class, and I can’t take that one.
The professor gave me this grade.
This paper here says I must do it this way.
The job description indicates I need these credentials.

It’s easy to get lulled into thinking there’s no way to fix it, get around it, get into it, or circumvent the published rules.

But there’s always a locksmith.

The locksmith doesn’t work for free, however. He will test you to determine how committed and worthy you are — a turbulent sea of automated menu options to navigate, circular website links, and inconvenient office schedules.

It’s worth it, though. Keep clicking till you find a phone number. Pick up the phone and fight through the menu system. Walk into her office with a book and stay till she shows up.

The locksmith has the power.

We know the earth isn’t flat, but it’s useful to assume it is when building your patio.
No history books detail a time in which the tortoise beat the hare, but it’s useful to assume it did when teaching about steady effort, overconfidence, persistence, and focus.

We could count the number of grains of sand on the beach in Salvo, NC and find its true value, but it’s not very useful.
A true answer exists to the question of whether or not we’re in a simulation, but it’s not very useful.

We’re humans. We have a constant battle being waged in our emotional being. As a result, we sometimes fail to focus on the useful and get hung up on what we think is the truth.

As a leader, your job is to acknowledge the truth but find the useful.

“What should we charge?”

If you’re an established service, all you need is a calculator. You can use a simple equation based on costs and time.
If you’re building a product, it’s probably not as simple an equation, but based on what the market will pay. A spreadsheet will help you here. If this, then that.

The problem isn’t actually deciding what to charge.

The problem is deciding what you’re worth.

We love to root for the little guy. 

When the big guy loses, it feels like justice. We’re excited at the unexpectedness, and we love to stick it to the man because the man is always out to get us and keep us down. Rock-n-roll might not exist without the man. For sure, Harley-Davidson wouldn’t.

We see the man — the institution, the elite, the system, the organization, the giant corporation, the Yankees — as an evil force. Faceless, soulless, and malevolent. When they lose, we delight in their suffering. 

The man, however, is made up of men…and women. Humans with names, faces, families, feelings, and T-Ball games. 

I don’t understand Schadenfreude on an intellectual level, but I understand it on an emotional level. It feels good when you win and someone else loses. At least for a few minutes. But once you lean into empathy, you can begin to see the faces. Each face has a story.

True progress comes when we move beyond the simple, toggle-switch narratives to a place where everyone has a name and a face. 

That’s how we win. 

“We got 3 months.”

Although the 3-month lens dooms many companies — or if not dooms, then at least shackles them in a cycle of short-sightedness and missed opportunities — it can also be exactly the catalyst that you need.

Time is a sneaky variable. You can feel like you have enough, and then you get complacent or take your eye off the ball.

Ninety days puts a box around it. A frame, outside of which you don’t care. Now you can focus and eliminate all other distractions.

“If we spend this money, will we get a return in 3 months?”
“If we choose this path, will it help us finish in 3 months?”
“If we pick blue instead of green, will we grow in 3 months?”

Burn the ships. Damn the torpedos. You got 3 months.

When I was a teenager, I had a plastic camera that took 110 film cartridges. I snapped random shots on our vacations or during the typical teenage events at the time.

I always bought Kodak film cartridges. I didn’t know there were any other brands.

You also knew Kodak and you also bought their film. They were ubiquitous. At its height in the mid-90s, Kodak had revenues of around $16 billion. Almost $11 billion came from selling and processing film.

Did you know Kodak invented the first digital camera? They also were the technology leaders in the space in the 80s and 90s.

But then they tanked their digital technology. On purpose.

Smart people decided that it would be dumb to cannibalize the core of the company. Why push digital photography when we make all of our money on film? What would the street think?

Makes sense. Hard to argue and easy to make the case.

Especially if you view your business through the 3-month lens of the public trading floor.

There’s no unexpected plot twist coming. You know how it ends for Kodak. They still exist, but its been a rough ride. They’ve been through bankruptcy and in 2023, brought in around $1 billion (and trending down). They’ve turned into primarily a commercial printing and chemical company.

The trouble with the 3-month lens is that it demands output and success right away. Make the decision that maximizes the next 3 months.

The future be damned.

We’ve created a roadmap for our product and business.

It’s the culmination of many discussions, arguments, and efforts. We like it. We think and feel good about it. 

Do we put the blinders on, buckle down, and don’t pick our heads up till we’ve realized the implementation?
Or do we start down that path but keep our heads up and ears open and re-evaluate our priorities and roadmap at each step?

Having a direction, goal, and purpose is important because distraction and constant re-evaluation can derail you just as quickly as going in the wrong direction. However, flexibility and openness are the only ways to ensure you don’t start in the wrong direction. 

Failure is a tractor beam. It’s hard to break free once you’re in its clutches. 

Your job, as the leader, is to determine how to stay out of the tractor beam, recognize when you’re caught in it, and fight like hell to break it’s grasp.

Don’t wag the team around. Keep them focused and heads down. You keep your head up and ears open. If you need to, don’t be afraid to get them moving in a different direction.