Leading on from Dan’s post recently about his experience starting up a new business, I thought I’d share a story with y’all. While the story itself is not important, it is analogous to many issues and experiences new business comes across…
For awhile I’d been moaning about the lack of strategic vision apparent around the directors of one of the businesses I’m involved in. It seemed every time we tried to talk about “higher level stuff” we’d get bogged down talking about why this widget wasn’t delivered and blaming each other and pretty soon it was yet another operations level meeting.
We decided, after spending a week offsite doing a strategic planning/team building session, that a dedicated space where we could go away from the operational parts of the business was in order. We made a board table (very nice it is too), bought some new chairs, got a big arse LCD to Skype and Dotproject on and presto – we had ourselves a boardroom.
Two months into the experiment I’m happy to advise that things are definitely better – sure around the board table there are varying levels of vision but in an SME where the owners are the managers are the directors this is unavoidable. Bottom line is that progress has been made and the aggregate level has been ratcheted up a notch or two.
The moral of this story…. environment matter. Sometimes it’s best to sweat the small and insignificant stuff in order to achieve the big and substantive stuff.