Wisdom from Above the Clouds

Have you ever been on a plane flight where as you take off all you can see out the window is hazy and overcast weather, only to at some time later have your flight break through and emerge above the clouds, where all of sudden the sun is shining bright and clear? If so, you’ll know how this gives one a sense of achieving clarity after having a long period of uncertainty and doubt.

Businesses are very much like this. As business leaders, we spend so much of our time and energy living life “beneath the clouds”… trying desperately day-in and day-out to lead our everyday operations in a way that ensures, executionally, everything goes “according to plan”. Never in all of this do we rise up above the clouds to seek — and to find — real clarity about the long term future of our business, not to mention the types of strategies we’ll need for our business to thrive in this future and remain resilient in the face of the many new challenges and changes it will inevitably bring.

This is problematic, as we live now in what has been called “the age of earthquakes”… a period in the history of businesses where radical market shifts — metaphorically speaking, “earthquakes” and “tsunamis” — are happening at an unprecedented, relentless, and accelerating pace.

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