quick fix

I spent a day with 100 shipbuilders last week. Just think about that. Building a ship!  Where is the shortcut? Where is there to hide if you get a bit wrong? What a timescale to work to. I always have a healthy respect for my audiences (I turn down the jobs where I don’t) but I found my respect growing for this lot during our day together.

The shipbuilders got me thinking about “time” on my journey home (Rule 8 is all about time). And planning (Rule 3). And the quick fix (no rule for that in TT). The Taming Tigers way is that there is unlikely to be a quick fix. Some things take time. There is no mantra. We cannot “re-program our minds”, we need to graft. The media-generated, modern idea of the quick fix conflicts with us though. It demands that “something must be done!”, that we can and must fix anything and “we can and must fix it now!”

Do you believe in the quick fix?  Or is your faith placed in the right fix?

I rarely see the quick fix in business. It’s there, for sure. But it’s rare – because it is rarely effective. It’s usually a fallacy. And as those bankers who quick fixed their bonuses from gambling their colleagues’ jobs on “sub-prime” (what a phrase) debt discovered, a fallacy is a dangerous foundation to build a business strategy upon.

Sometimes “it” can’t be fixed. Sometimes “it” has to fix itself. Sometimes “it” will take time, effort and a mass change of attitude and behaviour. In business there are consequences for failure. In business it should be that the lure of the quick fix is in inverse proportion to the likelihood of the slow lingering cock-up (see “sub-prime” above). The real world is not about today’s headline or a cabinet “re-shuffle” (what a phrase). It’s the world of the result or of the sacking.

But in the media and politics “something must be done [today]!” Really?

So as our appetite for borrowing more than we can afford to decreases, the UK government is to make debt compulsory for us, lumping that debt onto every man, woman and child in the country without asking nicely first. Interesting philosophy. But can you “quick fix” a clear message from the market?

I don’t think that my new shipbuilding friends would make the mistake of building or operating a ship based on a fallacy – we’ve seen the consequences of that. I do hope we are not building an economic future on one.

PS – I have – rashly – signed up to run the London Marathon for Racing Welfare in April 2009. If anybody knows of a “quick fix” to get fit for that, please let me know urgently. It’s getting cold and dark out there!