I don’t mean “Go with the Flow”, I mean find the direction of the current, see if it fits your purpose as in where you’re headed, and let it move you to as far as you think practicable. When the current turns away from your intended course, slip out of it and go under your own steam or find another current going where you want to go! If you’re more comfortable in the air, you might think of soaring from thermal to thermal, doing so effortlessly and without thinking as you survey the landscape below you.

Once again, I’ve been asked questions about “strategy and execution”, “leadership and management” and have had to listen to the same flogging of the proverbial dead horse again and again. I have to be careful to keep my cool and not tell people off, people whom I think ought to have known better than to insist on clear separations between what often prove to be two related functions.

We need to stop that. We need to stop being comfortable with knowing or having “The latest.” Very often, we parrot “The latest” without knowing the whys. You know what that is? Smugness. Trying to give people the impression that you know a lot when you can’t tell the difference between two related concepts and two related roles. Quoting “research” when you haven’t a clue as to who conducted the research, why it was done, how it was done and how the data was collected and organized, and how the researchers interpreted the data. Stop shooting your mouth off before you dig more deeply.

When you’ve tried everything possible and things still don’t work, then either you haven’t tried hard enough for long enough or what you’re trying doesn’t work, and you might like to try something else instead. If you have implemented every trick in the process book and you still get defective products, maybe it isn’t the manufacturing process or the assembly line, it might be something else. I’ll wager ten to one it’s a bottleneck manifesting in one of your line managers or higher up. Stop threatening and cajoling your workers to do better. Look at your managers or maybe your own Chiefs. Usually that’s where the problems lie!

So, don’t “Go with the flow” but “Get in the Flow” that serves you best at the time and place you’re at. Makes your life a lot easier!