THE BUSINESS WE MEANT TO BUILD

How good businesses lose their way

Chapter 13 – It Can’t Be Said in Four Lines

I recently posted one of my articles and received a comment suggesting, in essence, that it was too long. There was no great malice in the observation and, in the world in which we now communicate, there was probably a fair bit of logic behind it. We scroll rather than read, glance rather than consider and increasingly decide whether something deserves our attention before we have given it enough attention to make that decision. Apparently, if an idea cannot be reduced to four lines, preferably accompanied by an attractive photograph and perhaps a suitably inspirational quotation, there is a growing suspicion that the writer has taken too long to get to the point.

Perhaps I have. Then again, perhaps the point cannot always be said in four lines, and I am becoming increasingly concerned that our determination to make everything quicker, shorter and easier to consume is beginning to influence the way we think as much as the way we read. There are certainly things that deserve only four lines, and some deserve considerably less. There are other things, particularly in business, where the fifth line might be the one containing the information we really needed to know.

We live in a world of rush, rush, rush, where being busy has somehow become evidence that we are progressing. Emails arrive while we are answering emails, messages interrupt the messages we were already answering, and somewhere between the podcast telling us how to become successful and the social-media post explaining why everything we knew yesterday is now obsolete, we are expected to actually run a business. We are continually warned about disruption, artificial intelligence, new technology, changing consumer behaviour, emerging markets, new tax rules and competitors apparently doing extraordinary things somewhere just over the horizon. Standing still begins to feel dangerous, even when we have not stopped long enough to determine whether we are actually standing still.

That fear of being left behind is powerful because there is some truth within it. Businesses cannot simply ignore change, keep doing what they have always done and assume the world will politely wait for them. Markets change, technology changes and customers change, and refusing to recognise any of that can be every bit as dangerous as chasing every new idea that appears. The difficulty is that recognising change and reacting immediately to change are not the same thing, although the modern business conversation often treats them as if they were.

I have always liked a line from the wonderfully improbable world of Under Siege 2: Dark Territory (1995 – Warner Bros). Travis Dane’s mantra is, “Chance favors the prepared mind.” It sounds suitably dramatic when the fate of the world is being decided aboard a runaway train, but there is something considerably more useful buried inside it. The line does not say chance favours the fastest mind, the loudest mind or the mind that immediately signs up for whatever everybody else has suddenly discovered. It favours the prepared mind.

Preparation takes time, and perhaps that is the uncomfortable part of the message. A prepared mind has usually read beyond the headline, asked another question, checked the numbers and allowed the first flush of enthusiasm to subside before deciding that enthusiasm and opportunity are actually the same thing. It has considered what might go right without conveniently forgetting to ask what might go wrong. Most importantly, it has tried to understand whether the shiny new thing being presented as essential to everybody has any relevance to this particular business at all.

The shiny new thing is not necessarily bad. That qualification matters because there is an equally dangerous tendency to turn scepticism into resistance and convince ourselves that because some new ideas are rubbish, all new ideas must be rubbish as well. Artificial intelligence, automation, new systems, different marketing channels and emerging ways of working may offer extraordinary opportunities, and ignoring them simply because they are unfamiliar would hardly qualify as preparation. The question is not whether they are new but whether, after sufficient consideration, they are useful.

That is where four lines can become dangerous. Four lines can tell me that a new piece of software will revolutionise my business, but they probably cannot tell me what systems it replaces, how it integrates with what I already have, what the implementation will cost, whether my people will use it or what happens when the promised efficiencies fail to materialise. Four lines can tell me that everybody should be using a particular business structure, marketing strategy or management technique, but they rarely have enough room for the inconvenient words it depends. Those two words have probably saved more businesses from silly decisions than many of the considerably more impressive slogans written about success.

Perhaps this is where stopping to smell the roses has acquired an undeservedly lazy reputation. We tend to picture somebody abandoning responsibility for a pleasant afternoon while the serious people continue charging towards the future, yet there can be considerable discipline in stopping. The pause is not necessarily an escape from business; sometimes it is the first opportunity we have had to properly look at the business we are so busily running. There is not much value in racing ahead if we have forgotten to check whether the road still leads somewhere we actually want to go.

Over many years around businesses, I have watched owners worry about what somebody else is doing, sometimes to the point where they begin changing perfectly sound parts of their own operation. A competitor introduces something, an industry speaker predicts something, a consultant announces the next great revolution or somebody on social media appears to have discovered the secret the rest of civilisation somehow missed. Suddenly there is pressure to respond because doing nothing feels like falling behind. Yet doing nothing for the moment, while we work out what is actually happening, can be a decision rather than an absence of one.

There is a difference between procrastination and consideration, just as there is a difference between caution and fear. Procrastination keeps putting off a decision because making it is uncomfortable, while consideration gathers enough information to make the decision worth making. The distinction will not always be obvious from the outside because both can involve somebody apparently doing very little. Inside the business, however, one is avoiding responsibility while the other is exercising it.

The numbers have a useful habit of cutting through some of this excitement. If the latest idea promises more customers, greater efficiency, lower costs or spectacular growth, there ought eventually to be some connection between that promise and something capable of being measured. That does not mean every decision has to produce an immediate financial return or that instinct has no place in business, because neither proposition resembles the real world. It simply means enthusiasm deserves the company of evidence before we give it access to the cheque book.

The same applies to advice, including mine. An accountant, adviser, consultant, coach, author or bloke on Facebook may be able to point towards something worth considering, but none of us lives inside somebody else’s business in quite the way its owner does. We can explain consequences, identify risks, challenge assumptions and perhaps notice something that has become invisible through familiarity. What we should not be doing is removing the owner’s obligation to think, because borrowed certainty remains borrowed no matter how confidently it is delivered.

That is one of the reasons I am becoming less enamoured with the demand that complicated subjects be compressed until they become instantly digestible. Simplicity is valuable when it creates clarity, but it becomes something else when achieving it requires the removal of qualifications, consequences and inconvenient facts. There is a considerable difference between explaining something simply and pretending something is simple. Business has more than enough examples of the latter.

Perhaps we have trained ourselves to expect answers before we have properly formed the questions. We want to know whether we should adopt the technology, change the structure, employ the person, borrow the money, reduce the price, expand the business or follow the latest opportunity, and preferably we would like the answer before lunch. Sometimes an answer can be that clear. On other occasions, the most responsible answer may require us to wander around the problem for a while, poke at its edges and discover that the question we first asked was not actually the question that needed answering.

That wandering is not wasted time. I suspect some of the better decisions made in business arrive after conversations that went somewhere they were never intended to go, figures that were checked twice because something did not feel right, and ideas that survived being challenged rather than being protected from challenge. A prepared mind is not merely stuffed with information. It is a mind that has considered enough possibilities to recognise an opportunity when one finally appears.

There is an irony in all of this because slowing down may sometimes be the quickest way forward. The hour spent examining a decision can save months repairing it, just as the uncomfortable question asked before signing something can be considerably cheaper than the very uncomfortable question asked afterwards. None of this guarantees success because business does not offer that particular luxury. It simply improves the odds that when chance eventually presents itself, we recognise what we are looking at.

I am not proposing a rebellion against short articles, short meetings or short answers. Some meetings would represent a considerable advance in human civilisation if reduced to four lines, and there are documents circulating through businesses that could probably lose half their words without anybody noticing. Brevity remains a virtue when nothing of value is sacrificed to achieve it. The problem begins when brevity itself becomes the objective and thought is required to fit whatever space remains.

So perhaps the person who commented that my article was too long was right in one sense. It was too long for somebody who wanted the idea in four lines, and there is nothing particularly wrong with that because none of us is obliged to read everything placed in front of us. But I am not certain the answer is therefore to make every thought four lines long. Some ideas deserve enough room to breathe, develop, contradict themselves a little and perhaps leave us with a better question than the one with which we began.

Business may need more of that, not less. There will always be another shiny thing appearing around the corner, accompanied by somebody explaining why failing to adopt it immediately will leave us stranded in yesterday. We can chase it because everybody else appears to be chasing it, or we can stop occasionally, smell the business equivalent of the roses and find out what it actually is. Chance may favour the prepared mind, but preparation begins with giving ourselves permission to think.

And sometimes that simply cannot be said in four lines.