The Village is TOO Busy for Whales!

No amount of “busy-ness” should ever overrule your business. Keep your eyes on the work as well as on the opportunities on the horizon. A target filter will help you prioritize those opportunities to greatest advantage.

Yogi Berra had many malapropisms that made him famous and funny. One of my favorites is, “That place is so busy, nobody goes there anymore!” Like the too-crowded restaurant, a village convinced that it can’t hunt new whales because it is too busy with current responsibilities dooms itself to long-term difficulty and possible failure.

What are the symptoms of a village in overload mode?

See if any of these sound familiar:

• "I’m so busy right now; I can’t possibly put anything new on my plate."
• "You can never get Joe to come to meetings because he is so busy putting out fires."
• "Somebody has got to tell the sales department to slow down, or we will begin to lose people from overwork!"
• "If we are not careful, something is going to slip through the cracks, and then who are they going to blame?"
• "All we seem to do around here is meet and try to carve up the work differently so that it will get done. What we really need is a bunch more people."

Capacity is a difficult balancing act for a company trying to grow rapidly. It is hard to anticipate with accuracy the resources that you will need for new business while maintaining profitability and operational integrity. In essence, leadership is working with equations that have too many variables including new sales, current support, market conditions, client satisfaction, and long-term goals. It makes the head swim to consider how many ways you can get this calculus wrong and how few ways you can get it right.

Yet a company too busy to take on new customers today is doomed to have no new customers tomorrow. A company must have eyes looking out for new opportunities as well as eyes looking down and doing the work. Without eyes looking both places, you will most assuredly miss the whales… and perhaps the caribou, and the trout, and everything else it takes to keep your village alive.

Ideally, your company creates a target filter to sort the work and consider it strategically. Issues to consider include resources, profitability, long-term product development, and other key metrics specific to your business. Compare your opportunities against this filter, and figure out what items should be shelved, delayed, or acted upon. Be guarded with the precious resource of your firm’s time, and only take on work that makes sense for you to do. Build a strategic plan that identifies the “crunch points” at which new capacity needs to be sourced. Consider whether such capacity should be accomplished through technology, additional employees, realigned resources, outsource partners, and/or other creative options.

The Whale Hunters assist our clients to build target filters for accurate decision-making. When considering the variables, a good filter will manage the “now,” anticipate the “future,” and balance both against corporate goals. Sometimes organizations really are incapable of taking on new clients; but more often, they simply need to identify and try to eliminate those low-value activities that keep the village “too busy” and thus stand in the way of new whales.