The Perpetual Storm

by Jared Smith

In the throes of battle, the successful leader is calm, and it is this calm that gives troops the confidence needed to succeed.

If you are spinning your wheels in several different directions and continuously reacting to unforeseen events…If you feel like there are too many options and too few hours in the day… then you’re not alone.  As a matter of a fact, you belong to a large majority of busy professionals and leaders from around the world.

Why is work becoming so chaotic?  I recently heard Dan Sullivan, the CEO of Strategic Coach, indicate that technology has created an environment of perpetual change that is eroding confidence in leaders around the world.  A political advisor in the U.S. informed me that globalization has produced an extremely unstable landscape for businesses and their leaders, hence the incredibly escalating global turmoil that we have been witness to in the past few years.  Author Joseph Schumpeter describes what he terms creative destruction as a free market system that “incessantly destroys the old one, and incessantly creates a new one.”  And Peter Drucker explained that “the explosion of choice” has had the biggest impact on personal behavior in the 21st century.  Having sat down with my wife last night to watch television and having to choose one of 135 channels, I would tend to agree.

This “chaos” has created a severe lack of focus in leaders, businesses and their employees.  Attention Deficit Disorder seems to be penetrating the traditionally stable walls of work and the so-called “organization”.  Everywhere, companies and organizations seem to be struggling to keep up, not necessarily going anywhere specific, plunged into the multitude of options that arise from each new change.

Incite Solutions Inc. has made an interesting and simple observation through this chaos: leaders who thrive seem to have an incredibly strong sense of focus.  It seems as though merely developing a true sense of relaxed focus towards a specific set of goals produces incredible results.  The questions remain: what do successful leaders do to create a clear sense of focus and where do they begin?

We have observed that successful leaders begin by making clear decisions.  I.e. From a marketing perspective, whom should we target?  What area should we market in?  What products should we sell?  These leaders are specific, and they rarely spend a great deal of time worrying about lost opportunities.  Develop clarity and lead in confidence.  I suppose we have to accept the fact that we are caught in a perpetual storm of change, but our best weapon is going to be found from within ourselves.