I was on the phone with someone this morning who I should have talked with a month ago. I had kept putting the conversation off. Not because I didn’t want to talk with them, but because I couldn’t get myself organized to have a productive conversation.
She said, You must be very busy.
Not in any unmanageable way, I answered.
What I explained was that the restructuring process that we are undergoing at NCI is progressing in an orderly and productive fashion. There isn’t an unreasonable amount of time that needs to be spent on it, and the key issues are well-defined and being advanced by a team of very capable professionals who do this kind of thing all the time.
But it does create a distraction. In the face of uncertainty you spend time thinking through the different possible outcomes and waiting for the next development, which help you narrow that range of outcomes.
We brought the top management together this week to talk about where we are. I outlined my belief that as a company we’d come through two critical phases: the first, where we reacted to the economic downturn; and the second, where we created new frameworks for recovering.
We were now at the third phase: The selling phase. And, I observed, we weren’t moving with as much purpose and effectiveness as I wanted.
The problem, I think, is that we still believe we are mired in uncertainty. The questions “When will things improve” and “Will things get any worse” are central to our conversations.
That has to change. The real questions need to be “What did we do this week and how did it work?” and “If things didn’t work the way we expected, what should we change?” And then, we have to make the changes. The only way to have these conversations is to track, report and discuss specifics. Otherwise, you end up mired in generalities.
The challenge is to really demonstrate the mental fortitude and discipline to face forward. I acknowledge it’s hard, but boy, it’s necessary.
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