Musings at Altitude

We all know what “hand-eye coordination” is.  It’s the difference between batting .300 and .175.  It’s the difference between a puck getting blocked by a goalie and a goal.  It’s the difference between a catcher actually catching a pitch or getting hit in the forehead (that happened to me – thus off to left field).

In business, we have our own version of hand-eye coordination because we too are supposed to be seeing the things happening in front of us and reacting to those things in a way that allows us to swing/catch/block/reject as needed.  And those most successful in business are those that have the best vision-action coordination.

In these tough economic times where annual reports and quarterly newsletters are constantly saying, “this has been a tough year for our company”, we need business leaders with phenomenal vision-action coordination.  We need to see clearly the storm clouds growing on the horizon.  We need to sense the growing delays in contracts or orders.  We need to feel the presence of competition coming up behind us.  We need listen to the whispers of policy makers and those in governance positions.  And we need to accelerate our business or make course corrections based on all of these things.

Unfortunately, many businesses are just like the batter than can hit any fastball to any part of the ball park.  So the pitcher throws that batter a curve, and sure enough, that awesome hitter strikes out. 

Change ups are the norm now.  A steady string of fastballs is the exception.

It’s time to get better at hitting change ups.

Or time to get new leaders with better vision-action coordination.