Normalizing Necessary Endings: Welcome the Seasons of Life into Your Worldview
I was introduced to Blair by a friend of mine on a golfing trip. “So what do you do, Blair?” I asked.
“I am in bonds!” he said, with an upbeat kind of energy sparked by the question. I remember thinking, Must like it, that bond work.
“It’s more than that,” our mutual friend said. “He is one of the top guys in the country right now.”
“Wow, that’s cool,” I said. “Have you been in bonds for a long time?”
“No, not too long,” he said. “It’s a second career for me. I was in chemical manufacturing for a long time, and then made a switch a couple of years ago.”
“And you got to the top in a second career that fast?”
“Yep, it just all worked,” he said, an answer that seemed to have a lot of drop-down menus behind the headline. So the performance coach part of me had to hear the rest of the story, as I know that those sorts of changes don’t happen without a lot of good things occurring in a person.
“How did you go from manufacturing to bonds? What was that move like?” I inquired.
“Well, I owned a company that sold a chemical process that had the writing on the wall, so I got out just in time,” he said. “Or after it was time, depending on how you look at it.”
“What do you mean the ‘writing on the wall’?” I asked. “What kind?”
“The process that we sold looked like it was becoming less and less needed because of other changes in technology, and our sales were reflecting that. It was becoming obsolete. As I looked into the future, it was not looking good. So, I sold it. Got out, did some classwork, studied, got a securities license, and here I am.”
“OK, but you aren’t twenty-five with a backpack and a bike going to class. Wasn’t that a big deal?” I wondered out loud as I pictured what kind of disruption this must have been in the middle of life.
“Yeah, it was. Mortgage, kids headed for college, and I had sunk a lot [heavy sigh, eyes closed] of money into the company. To make the change and to watch all of that go away was not easy. But, I knew, after a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of effort, going over it and over it trying to find a way to make it work, that it had no life in it. As hard as I had tried to make a go of it, I had to get out and do something different.”
And he did. And he had found life again in his new career.
He told me, though, there had been many temptations to keep believing that the old business could turn around, and many times he kept investing good money after bad—second mortgages on the house, outside money, the whole thing. But he finally came to what we will examine later as “the moment.” There was a moment in time where he knew that it was “time” to get out. He had to end it and move on.
What impressed me was not only his courage to begin a whole new career at his stage in life, but also the contrast to another friend whom I was watching in a similar situation but with a much different outcome. Geoff was also in a business whose time had come and gone with changes in technology, but he was still holding on. His company was tied to satellite technology that enabled multiple locations of companies to communicate with each other, but Web technology was quickly closing in. Having made a fortune in another industry, he had bought this company with a lot of promise, but over the last few years, their niche and advantage were disappearing.
Instead of waving the white flag and morphing into something new, he was determined to make it work. He had convinced more than half of his board that it would, and they were continuing to look for money to keep it going. He still maintained that undaunted sense of what he called the leadership trait of “hope,” and he was steadfast. But in my mind and in the minds of the other members of his board—not to mention potential investors, who were increasingly not returning calls—what he was calling hope was only an empty wish. He was headed for a crash, and it was just a matter of time.
What was the difference between Geoff and Blair? Was it brains? Was it experience? Was it market savvy? No, it was none of those. They both possessed equal amounts of talent and brains. It was something that goes deeper.
The difference was how comfortable they were with endings, which enabled Blair to see what needed to be done, and made Geoff keep the blinders on.
Blair overcame his internal conflict and initiated an ending when he finally saw that it was time, and yet my friend Geoff had hit a wall. Even the most gifted people and leaders are subject to feeling conflicted about ending things, so they resist that moment of truth. And not only do they resist, they sometimes cannot even see. Thus they find themselves crosswise with the very nature of life itself.
Make Endings Normal
In the last chapter, I asked you to use a gut check to examine your feelings about pruning, to come to terms with your previous beliefs about endings, and to honestly assess where your internal resistances lie. This is the first step to moving forward. The second step is this:
Make the endings a normal occurrence and a normal part of business and life, instead of seeing it as a problem.
Then and only then can you align yourself well with endings when they come. It has to do with your brain and how it works.
If a situation falls within the range of normal, expected, and known, the human brain automatically marshals all available resources and moves to engage it. But if the brain interprets the situation as negative, dangerous, wrong, or unknown, a fight-or-flight response kicks in that moves us away from the issue or begins to resist it. Execution stops or automatically goes in the other direction. Put into the context of endings, if you see them as normal, expected, and even a good thing, you will embrace them and take action to execute them. You will see them as a painful gift. But if you see an ending as meaning “something is wrong if this has to happen,” you will resist them or fight them long past when they should be fought. Endings have to be perceived as a normal part of work and life.
Unlike my friend Geoff, Blair had no conflict other than the need to work through the normal painful process that it takes to get to the “moment.” He had tried to make his business work, numbed himself at first to the reality, protested and fought it by trying other strategies, turning up the crank and tried even harder, looking for new customers, etc. etc.—really rallying and pushing. He, like any other good leader, was embracing the problem and tackling it head-on. That is perseverance and a good trait. It is essential and causes businesses to be rescued out of the jaws of defeat every day.
But, he was also able to admit when more effort was not going to bring about a different result. That is the moment, when someone really gets it and knows that something is over. You have seen the scene in the movies when the patient dies, the doctor looks up at the clock, quotes the time of death, breathes a heavy sigh, pulls off her gloves, and walks out the door. The doctor has done everything in her power to avoid this outcome, but when the monitor goes to the steady beep, she accepts what is normal, albeit unwanted, and moves on to try to save the next life.
Likewise in business and life, there comes a moment when that reality must be seen and grasped. Blair was able to grasp it because it fit into his worldview, that sometimes things end. His view of normal included the fact that “this happens sometimes.” It is just as important a leadership and personal trait as perseverance. As a result of it, he could take the moment and move on. Now he is at the top of another field. If he could not have done that, he could still be at the bottom of the old one, trying very, very hard and talking to the hundredth group of investors.
Geoff, on the other hand, does not view endings as a normal part of the way the world is. In his head, if something is not working, the only option is to “solve the problem” or “work on the strategy or sales.” His worldview does not enable him to ask, Is this thing over? He is blind to the fact that his business is in a product line whose time has passed; instead, he thinks the team just needs to work harder or better. The truth is that there is no problem to be solved, other than to get a new set of problems.
This does not mean that Geoff’s company has to die completely, but it will not survive if Geoff doesn’t end their current product emphasis and morph it into something new and different. But he cannot do that because he is in conflict with endings in general. He sees them as failure instead of sometimes a natural occurrence.
Certainly I am not saying that every time something is not working, it should end. In fact, it is usually the opposite. As I said, most good ideas have problems and hit obstacles, and leadership takes them through the crises and struggles to success. That is why we need turnaround experts.
But there is a time, a moment, when it is truly over, and if that is not in your view of life, you can miss the right time to get out and to turn your attention to something different or new. In an upcoming chapter, we will look at a paradigm for diagnosing when to have hope and when to give up, but for now, here is your assignment: take a look at your worldview, and see if you see endings as a normal part of life, to be fought if they show up before their time but to be embraced when their time has come. Let’s look at three organizing principles that will help you make endings both necessary and normal: first, accept life cycles and seasons; second, accept that life produces too much life, and third, accept that incurable illness and sometimes evil are part of life too. Taken together, these three principles will help you to make peace with endings, so that when their time has come, you will be able to do what you need to do.
1. Accept Life Cycles and Seasons
Life is composed of life cycles and seasons. Nothing lasts forever. Even the ceremonial liturgy of marriage, a lifelong commitment, acknowledges an end on its first day, “till death do us part.” Life cycles and seasons are built into the nature of everything. When we accept that as a fundamental truth, we can align our actions with our feelings, our beliefs with our behaviors, to accept how things are, even when they die.
Everything has a life cycle. There is a time to be born and a time to die, as we read earlier. And in between birth and life, there are many activities, which have their own seasons too.
Each season also has its own set of activities. Spring is about sowing and beginnings. Where there is nothing but a waiting field, the farmer sows seeds in the expectation that they will take root and produce a harvest.
The tasks of spring include:
• Cleaning out what is left over from the winter’s dying plants;
• Gathering seeds;
• Figuring out which fields you are going to work;
• Making sure you have the resources to take you through the year;
• Actual sowing and planting;
• Protecting seedlings from the elements and intruders; and
• Nurturing the vision of the harvest to guide the task.
In summer, things change again. It is time to tend to what has taken root. The tasks of summer include:
• Directing resources to ensure the crops are growing;
• Preventing disease and keeping insects and other pests away;
• Watering, fertilizing, and pruning;
• Supporting the plants until they can stand on their own; and
• Monitoring, managing, and protecting the crops for the future.
Fall is harvest time:
• Acting with urgency to get crops out of the field before they rot or are damaged by rain or the cold of winter;
• Gathering the harvest completely, not leaving anything in the field;
• Harvesting with efficiency and watching the costs; and
• Harvesting with care so you don’t destroy the field in the process.
In winter, everything dies, though preparations continue. The tasks of winter include:
• Getting the financials in order;
• Squaring accounts with lenders for last years’ crops and lining up next year’s money;
• Repairing equipment and getting it ready for next year;
• Preparing fields for the upcoming year; and
• Reviewing the successes and failures of the past year and tweaking things to do everything better next year.
The problem comes when we do not accept or we willfully ignore these seasons. One classic example is the entrepreneur who begins a business through “sowing seeds” into a market: making calls, meeting people, investing seed money, starting-starting-starting. Every aspect is generative in nature. That is the first season.
The business takes root. Summer comes. Now you have a real plant, not a start-up. Now you have a business that needs to be managed, guided, nurtured, developed, protected, trimmed, watered, and so on. That requires leadership and management, skills a lot of entrepreneurs don’t have. Or at least they resist developing because they have not come to grips with the reality of the seasons. They think all of life and business is a start-up. “More, more, more,” is their mantra. That can kill a business that could have had a very good life if someone had seen that sowing had to stop and operating had to begin.
At other times, the end of summer is not seen, and there is no urgency to harvest what has been grown. There is much low-hanging fruit in the business, but the management phase has become the way that everything is always done, the “new normal” instead of a season. This often makes a company ripe for a takeover. Deep-pocketed investors look at the business and see a lot of harvest that is not being captured because management is too busy “tending” to business, a summer activity, instead of moving on to a fall harvest.
Then, finally, harvest season ends, and it is time to shut down and exit that line, strategy, sector, or whatever. But the ones who don’t believe in seasons think that it is going to last forever. Real estate developers, for instance, who don’t believe in life cycles, go long on land when the market is up, thinking “we can mine this field forever.” They build big infrastructures with huge overhead in the boom harvest times (remember the dot-com days) and then, when the days get short, they are caught without enough resources to keep the lights on. They just did not believe that a winter would ever come.
So believe in life cycles and seasons. They are real. Therefore, when the days get shorter or it is time to change, you will not think that “something is wrong,” but you will accept the change as readily as a farmer accepts the turning of the calendar. Then you will be able to end the previous season’s appropriate activities and move to the next. Endings are easier to embrace and execute when you believe something normal is happening.
That lesson learned helps boards move founders into other roles and bring in seasoned management. They do not have to approach it as if the founder is failing. It helps CEOs make tough decisions also, knowing that they are aligning their business with the natural order that they see unfolding before them. It makes letting go of a long love affair with a product line or a brand possible.
Blair implicitly believed in life cycles and seasons, and he saw that the long harvest that he had enjoyed for so many years was about to end. It was time to shut down and get out while the assets and revenues that were left still had some value. But more than capturing value from what was left, the real task was to get to a field that had some harvest in its future.
And when he moved to selling bonds, he acted in accord with the new seasons. He accepted the tasks of winter, the death of his old business, and “retooled.” He studied a new field and got his license. He cleaned the farm, getting rid of everything from the old business that would slow him down, including overhead and debt. He was truly making room for the new. That is what letting go looks like.
Later he began to do the tasks of spring. He went out to sow. He made his calls, worked his contacts, and went looking for new prospects to plant in his new field. Sowing, sowing, sowing. As he landed them, though, unlike a lot of hyper sales types, he tended them as spring turned to summer. He nurtured those relationships and grew them. Slowly the trust grew and the relationships grew, but he did not just keep tending; he moved to making sales, to harvesting those relationships. And harvest he did.
Meanwhile, my other friend is still stuck. He is trying to make something work that is not going to work because its time has passed. And he will continue to try until the bankers and the investors come change the locks. It happens, and often it happens because someone doesn’t have a worldview that normalizes endings, which are built into the universe itself: life cycles and seasons.
And it is not only in business. Many marriages, for example, fail because the couple does not make the shift from spring to summer. Spring, the sowing time, is new, exciting, forward-looking, risky, stretching, and enlarging of both people. But after a while, the relationship has to be tended to—the tasks of summer. Some people do not make that shift, wanting the sowing to continue, and they become disillusioned, or in the alpha-male version, continue to sow elsewhere. Serial sowing becomes a pattern, and over a number of years, no relationship equity, no trust, is ever built. If they could see that sowing ends and the work of tending begins, they could harvest an incredible relationship that lasts for many more seasons.
Here are some questions to ponder about your business and your life that may help you to see if your worldview and subsequent activities are taking seasons into account:
• Do I accept that endings are natural?
• Am I, like a doctor diagnosing, always asking what season I am in?
• Do I resist the endings required for changing seasons? If I believed in life cycles and seasons, would I stop resisting?
• Am I hanging on to an activity, product, strategy, or relationship whose season has passed? What tasks do I need to change to enter the new season?
• Am I sowing when I should be tending?
• Am I tending when I should be harvesting? Am I trying to harvest in a field where winter is clearly setting in?
• Is it winter, and am I ignoring the retooling and planning that is timely for now?
In the language of Ecclesiastes, are there situations in business or in life where you are trying to birth things that should be dying? Trying to heal something that should be killed off? Laughing at something that you should be weeping about? Embracing something (or someone) you should shun? Searching for an answer for something when it is time to give up? Continuing to try to love something or someone when it is time to talk about what you hate?
2. Accept That Life Produces Too Much Life
One reason pruning is needed is the fact that the bush produces more buds than it can bring to full maturity. Any bush that is alive and thriving is producing more and more buds every cycle. And any person or business that is thriving is doing the same. Life begets life. That is normal. But it can be too much, as well. This second principle will make pruning normal for you as you accept the reality that life produces more:
• Relationships than you can nurture;
• Activities than you can keep up with at any significant level;
• Clients than you can service all in the same way;
• Mentors who once “fit” but whose time has past;
• Partners whose time has past;
• Product lines than you can focus on;
• Strategies than you can execute; and
• Stuff than you have room for and can store.
So by definition you are going to have to be in the letting-go phase all through life. There is a reason that the term “spring cleaning” came into existence and morphed to mean more than just cleaning, an overall organizing and throwing away of accumulated “stuff.” We need it both for quantitative and qualitative reasons.
Quantitatively, we gather more along the way than we have room for. I recently read that Bill Gates quit Facebook because he had too many friends. He was quoted as saying he had “trouble figuring out whether he ‘knew this person, did I not know this person.’ It was just way too much trouble so I gave it up” (news.ninemsn.com, July 26, 2009). I don’t know why he was burdened by that, as big numbers do not normally send him running, but you get the idea. But quantitatively, your life and your business are going to do the same thing. Just time and activity alone brings more relationships and activities than you have time to service. As a result, they overload the tree and its resources, and you don’t have enough of you to give to them. They crack the system as it is overloaded.
Qualitatively, you can’t pour yourself into any of them with much depth. When the numbers are too high, quality suffers. I love it when I hear leaders finally figure out that they are not investing enough time in some of their key relationships or direct reports, because they are trying to interface with too many activities or people. They have realized that their success depends on having the time and energy resources to go deep with a few relationships, and they have to end the wish to go deep with everyone, as it leads to skimming the surface with almost everyone.
The truth is that high-functioning people have many, many relationships, and many, many activities. That is a good thing. According to brain research and theory, we seem to have a capacity to really manage about 140 to 150 relationships. Obviously not all to the same degree, but the system can handle that number, apparently. Who knows if life on the Internet and social networking will cause that capacity to evolve and get larger as we use it, but it is substantial as it already is.
But it is also true that the high-functioning people who have extensive networks and relationships that really work well are also very, very good at not having some, as well. They prune them. High-performing salespeople prune their contact lists for quality. Smart companies prune their customers, focusing on those who deliver the most profitability with the fewest resources. Businesses prune activities and alliances, and individuals drop out of some social ties.
These people have accepted a reality—that they generate more activity than they can fruitfully handle. So they can cut these ties without feeling that “something is wrong” or that they are “being mean to someone.” They respect the fact that there are limits to what they can do, to whom or what they can invest in.
Successful business leaders face this truth all the time. Starbucks has had a lot of life in the past years. And what does anything that is alive do? It creates more buds than it can sustain. So this year news came out that said they were closing down hundreds of stores. Who knows what all went into getting more stores than they or the market could nurture, but it sounds as though the decision to cut some of those buds may be getting in line with the way that things naturally fall out. Apparently, someone there has a worldview that includes the reality that sometimes you have more buds than you can grow. Often, when that occurs, the stock price goes up. As Anne Mulcahy, Xerox’s chairman and former CEO, recently remarked, “One of the most important types of decision making is deciding what you are not going to do, what you need to eliminate in order to make room for strategic investments. This could mean shutting down a program. It could mean outsourcing part of the business. These are often the hardest decisions to make, and the ones that don’t get nearly enough focus” (McKinsey Quarterly, March 2010).
Come to grips with this truth, that your life and your business produce more buds than you can nurture, and you will end some things more readily and easily. It won’t register as so traumatic, nor will your brain resist as if something is wrong.
3. Accept That Incurable Sickness and Evil Exist
Your business and your life will change when you really, really get it that some people are not going to change, no matter what you do, and that still others have a vested interest in being destructive. Once you accept that, some very necessary endings get much easier to do. But until then, you might find yourself laboring much longer than you should, still trying to get someone to change, thinking that one more coaching session will do the trick—or one more bit of encouragement, or one more session of feedback or confrontation. Or worse, one more concession.
I have watched well-meaning people literally waste years and millions of dollars trying to bring someone along who is not coming. And often the person may have lots of other talent that the leader doesn’t want to lose, or he likes the person so much that he is willing to try over and over again. I watched one COO have a breakthrough moment when, after the umpteenth time he’d attempted to get a marketing person to perform, he finally just scratched his head and admitted, “He just thinks the wrong thoughts.” The COO had finally given up and was able to end the misery soon thereafter. But for about a year, he had been trying to get the marketing guy to “see.” The marketing guy was very gifted in his work with people but had grandiose ideas and plans that did not work, even while he ignored the diligent blocking and tackling that was needed. He was trying to throw the “Hail Mary” pass when he should have been trying to consistently advance the ball a few yards. The COO tried over and over to get through but couldn’t. We don’t even have to explain the ways this happens in people’s personal lives. It is too obvious, if you just notice the lunchtime discussions.
In an upcoming chapter, we will spend considerable time on how to diagnose the people who are worth your investment of time and trust, which ones may be willing and able to change and improve and which ones won’t. The ability to perform this diagnosis is one of the most valuable skills you’ll ever learn. So hold on. But for now, come to grips with the fact that some people—no matter how much you give them or how much you try to help them improve their performance in business or in their personal lives—are not going to change. At least not now, and not as a result of anything you are doing. Accept it, and it will get easier to take the necessary steps to make an ending. You will go from being in shock or in denial to asking yourself the right question: what am I dealing with here?
Similarly, as we have mentioned, some businesses, strategies, visions, tactics, or products are too sick to recover and need to be scrapped. We will discuss that diagnostic path as well, but again for now, accept terminal illness and failure as a valid possibility. The best performers know how to fail well. They see it, accept it, and move on. They do not keep beating the dead horse, or worse, riding the one with the broken leg. They can call it quits, wave the white flag, and go forward.
A Different Universe
This chapter has been about getting in line with reality. Many people wish for a different universe than the one in which we live. They want one where every day is harvest time and there are no long laborious summer months to go through in order to get there. And when the harvest is ripe and they are thriving, they want no approaching winters where they see that the harvest is over and a cold death is looming.
Also, they want a world where they have no limits. They want to believe that they have enough time and energy to gather people, products, and activities infinitely and never have to end any of them. They do not want it to be true that at some point, they run out of time and energy and have to make hard choices. They want a limitless life where time and space are not realities.
And they want a world where every person is committed to being good and getting better. In this world, if they try to help someone long enough, that person will improve, wake up, and get it. They do not want this universe, the one we really live in, where some people just don’t change and still others truly want to hurt you.
But this is the only universe we have, and in it all three of these realities exist. Successful leaders are very much at one with those realities, and when they come upon one of them, their brains do not send signals saying something is wrong. They are aligned and integrated people who are friends with reality. So when one of these realities appears, their brains see these situations as normal, although sometimes painful, and move toward them decisively and with courage and hope. And they are always wisely asking, “What kind of situation do I really have here?”
They know that if they execute the ending of one season’s tasks and get on to the next one’s, good things can occur. They know that if they cut some relationships and activities away, others will flourish. And they know that if they give up on trying to change someone who doesn’t want to change or is not ready, they will have helped that person get one step closer to seeing reality, and they will have freed themselves from the person’s negative patterns. So they take that step with love, certainty, and resolve. As we go forward, we will look at some of the particulars of how to create these kinds of endings. But first, make sure you have accepted the real universe where you live and work. Reality is tough, but as Woody Allen said, reality is “still the only place to get a good steak.” And have a good business, and life.