SEATTLE–Successful leaders always embrace the “Rule of Things That Will Never Change,” according to one person.
Writing on Inc.com, Jeff Haden said he is often asked “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” But the question he is almost never asked is, “What's not going to change in the next 10 years?'
Most organizations, he said, put considerable effort into attempting to identify how the world will be different a decade from now and then how to best respond.
But those same organizations would be better off, observed Haden, if they instead focused their energy on understanding what isn’t going to change and investing there.
“When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it,” he wrote. “That's what Elon Musk (and Aristotle before him) would call a first principle: ‘Boiling things down to their fundamental truths, and reasoning up from there.’”
Questions to Ask
The kinds of questions leaders should be asking, suggested Haden, include:
- Will spending time mentoring and developing current employees instead of spending time and money to recruit and train new employees perhaps not turn out to be an improvement?
- Does putting a little more time into increasing the lifetime value of current customers instead of focusing solely on gaining new customers?
- Does empowering your employees by giving the authority and autonomy to make more decisions make more sense instead of settling for the gross inefficiencies inherent in command-and-control leadership?
“In almost every case, you can do more with what you already have,” wrote Haden. “And you can better control what you already have. While you will still need to adapt and evolve, those facts never change.”