Herman School of Business
Climbing the Ladder...
When you stand on the ground and want to get on the roof why do so many people not understand that you have to climb the ladder? What I mean is they take getting on the roof for granted. Oh, they get out the ladder and they set it against the house and they put one foot on the first rung and pull themselves up one rung at a time. At the top of the ladder they step off onto the roof and don’t think twice about how they got there.
The planning part was as simple as pie…I am here, I want to get up there, I get the ladder, I climb the ladder and I am on the roof. Somehow the knowledge was already in their mind and they just instinctively completed the task.
That is, if the roof is about fifteen feet up.
When the roof gets higher, say 25 feet, then it gets a bit more dicey. The plan is still to simply climb a ladder until you are on the roof, but 25 feet sure looks high doesn’t it? Let’s make the roof 50 feet high. That now changes everything…more planning, maybe a scaffold and then a ladder…maybe a winch from the top of the roof to build a little elevator type rig and go up that way. But how do you get on the roof to put the winch up?
What do you want to accomplish…that is the roof for you. Do you want a life full of little things with a real low roof? Or maybe you want to accomplish a little more, with a roof a little higher. The higher the roof, the more you must have a plan.
Failing to plan is planning to fail.
- Posted: 15 April 2009
- Comments: 1
- Category: Running a business
What are your suggestions though for those who are mid-way up the ladder and realize that they are climbing to the wrong roof?
(I love metaphors – and blog posts – like this!)
Written by Matt Corker on 15 April 2009