Building: It’s The Plan, Man!

“A doctor can bury his mistakes, but an architect can only advise his clients to plant vines.”
     ―    Frank Lloyd Wright

Building is easier than building well, building right.  A new leader can build momentum and depending how starved for trust the organization is, a new leader can even build trust pretty quickly.  Building confidence can be simple, but it can be really challenging to maintain when headwinds present themselves.  Building something sustainable, though, requires something more than quick feet, decent tools and an “out of the box” repeatable process.

All this to say that building is only part of the picture — and we want to build things that are solid, long-lasting and in need of no vines to cover up flaws.

Particularly in turn-arounds, it can be tempting to come in, plunk down the play-book and begin to hammer through the changes that are obvious.  Pricing.  Contracts.  Marketing.  Compensation plans.  If all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail, after all.  And just jumping in and hammering can be dangerous unless everyone understands what we’re building.  (“Everyone,” means everyone, too.  Clients.  Shareholders.  Employees.  Partners.  Employees’ spouses.  Etc.)  Even more dangerous is the temptation to just keep-on-hammerin’ when times are good, unless we really understand why they’re good and what the signs of trouble might be.

In other words, it’s all about the plan, man!

Now before you go all “execution” on me, of course execution matters.  A crappy contractor can make even Frank Lloyd Wright look like a hack.  It’s not plan-over-execution, it’s plan before execution.  And that doesn’t mean a full stop to plan, either.  The best plans evolve with the business, so planning while executing matters, too.

A new leader might be tempted to just switch out all the people — start with a clean slate.  While “clean” is a positive word, “blank,” its synonym, is a little less rosy in the business context.  Thus, great “remodelers” know that using the “bones” of an existing structure is the best, least expensive and most effective way of building something new from a sustaining legacy.

The good news, as it pertains to Wright’s quote above, is that we can, in business, bury our mistakes.  As long as we’re not repeating them.  And as long as we’re constantly building — and executing — better plans.