Daily Inspiration: “You’ve got this much room to get your strategy right – your margin of error is becoming smaller by the moment!”

“You’ve got this much room to get your strategy right – your margin of error is becoming smaller by the moment!” – Futurist Jim Carroll

I was working on this mornings quote when the Beatles song, “Tomorrow Never Knows,” came onto my my laptop. With that, insight!

Tomorrow never really knows, but you need to come up with a strategy in the light of that reality.

Things happen so fast today that yesterday’s strategy for today is already tomorrow’s business fable.

What you thought at the time was the right thing to do? It’s already an old idea!

In the old days of the record industry, a band would go into the studio and cut an album in a day. The Beatles recorded their first album, Please Please Me, in just one day. Later, it took them months to cut the White Album, as their efforts became bloated, their thinking muddied, their imagination sputtering.

I see the same thing with many of my global clients today. They know they have to think and act fast — and come up with effective strategies to deal with the challenge of change at an accelerated pace.

And yet, they are like the Beatles in the studio during the Let it Be sessions. Too many competing agendas; too much angst and anguish; the introduction of a new partner to the process who upsets a carefully dynamic.

These clients often ask me to provide my guidance on how they can strategize in this era of acceleration, and my response is always the same: “Think big, start small, scale fast!”

You can’t expect perfection in your strategy today; it’s an iterative process that you need to make up on the fly!

Because – tomorrow never knows!