What do you do first?

I had a professor in business school who loved to pose this question: “the wolf is at the door. What do you do first?”

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The case studies he presented typically opened in a grim scenario: “It’s your first morning as the CEO hired to rescue a struggling business. Sales are down. The company is months behind on its payments to vendors.  The employees are nervous.  You sit down at your desk for the first time and your phone starts to ring.  What do you do?”  

 

Early in the semester, he’d receive suggestions one would expect from analytically minded MBA candidates.  We wanted to review profitability by customer and drop money-losing product lines, or build staffing models to identify where to cut payroll.  His response was consistently more pointed. “No. The phone is ringing, and it’s probably your vendor looking for money.  Do you answer the phone?  Do you go talk to the employees?  Do you reach out to top customers?  What do you do next, in that very moment?”  

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I’m an enthusiastic consumer of business theories.  By definition, my role as CFO requires me to support long and short term decisions through forecasting and analysis.  But these theories and analyses are tools, not action plans.  They are guiding principles, but only gain value when used to influence day-to-day, minute-to-minute activities of management.  

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When in Doubt, Begin

On your journey to drive real change at your business, the obstacle that is most consistently difficult to surmount is the lack of time.  In the best of circumstances, being a leader involves bandwidth assigned to meetings and memos, customer visits and employee reviews.  In the worst, your remaining free time is quickly absorbed by fire drills of delayed shipments and software downtown and missed covenants.   Despite constantly being told to “work on the business, not in the business”, the practicality of your day-to-day responsibilities leave precious few minutes for that.  

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You know what you want to do; you’ve read books and case studies, consumed podcasts and Ted talks.  But the reality of management is not always reflected in the seemingly controlled environments of the business cases.  With your day-to-day responsibilities always lurking at the door, it can feel risky to cash in that precious free time to launch a new initiative.  Waiting for the perfect moment often results in no moment at all.  

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I was motivated to create these articles to bridge the gap between those valuable business theories and the practical ways to implement them.  No one can make this easy for you.  “Easy” isn’t a word that should be used for any management or leadership role in any type of organization.  Instead, I will use my experiences to build a roadmap, to help break these efforts into manageable pieces, and to hopefully save some pain by sharing my missteps along the way.  If I am successful here, you will be more confident in taking the first step, knowing that you have some guidance along the way.

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Let Me Know What You Think

Finally, I’m eager for feedback.  Reach out at the email below, comment in the Blog posts, or connect with me on LinkedIn.  If you have something you think I should read or watch, please share; I'm always looking for suggestions.  If you really like these articles, let me know, and please circulate to those you know who would benefit.  If you don’t like them… let me know that too, but be nice about it…