Contemporary business theory places great amounts of emphasis on strategy and long-term thinking.  These concepts are most definitely of great importance, but there is one critical aspect of successful long-term strategy that many theories and systems fail to comprehend.  That critical insight is how all strategies, regardless of how large or small ultimately distill down to steps that must be acted upon in the present tense.  Furthermore, these action steps frequently break down into smaller steps.

Thus, it becomes true that the largest, most grand, and most complex strategies all come down to one small step.  That one step is the next step.  Once the next step has been taken, focus shifts tot he step after that, and the step after that, and the step after that.  The long-term perspective must always yield to the immediate action, because long-term results can only be accomplished through a continuous string of actions.

Another way of considering this concept is to understand the relationship between past, present, and future . . . both in regards to thought and action.  The past is beyond our ability to influence, but its insights are ours to discover.  Yesterdays victories cannot be relied upon to sustain us into the future, and yesterdays failures have passed into history.  We cannot exist in the past, because the past is gone.  The present is where we recognize current opportunities and act to capture them.  The knowledge of the past can help us to see opportunities, but they must all be captured in the present.

The present represents both the past of our future and the future of our past.  Todays opportunities will be gone tomorrow, and tomorrow’s opportunities cannot be captured today.  As we look into the future, we see the present that has not yet come to past.  None of us can act in the future until the future becomes the present.  The opportunities of the future are valuable to understand, as they will pass into the present tense over due time.

We must be mindful of the future, but we cannot live in the future.  The future is most certainly inevitable, but all that we do must take place in the present.  Furthermore, it is not practical to indefinitely delay all enjoyment of life for the sake of the future.  Life is for living, and each person must balance the present against the future, without being weighed down by the past.  We must understand that the future can only be built by decisions and actions that we take in the present.  Thus, what we do now is ultimately what is of the greatest importance, since the future necessarily build on the present.

In this way, we realize success by taking one small step . . . our next step.  The steps that we take are shaped by our vision of the future, and our recognition of opportunity.  However, the only way that we can turn this into reality is by taking action in the present.  Each of us has the distinct opportunity to shape our lives by taking action right now.  Success is not a multi-thousand step process, it is a one step process . . . your next step.  By consistently taking action on your next step toward success, it will keep you perpetually moving toward greater and greater achievements.  Each of us can increase the influence that we wield over our lives by taking action right now on one small step toward success.

In the end, achieving our ambitions is both more complex and more simple than most people realize.  The complexity arises from prioritizing between all the things that we wish to achieve and all the decisions that we must make.  The simplicity comes from the fact that all achievements result from individual actions.  And we can achieve our goals by isolating and prioritizing the individual actions that need to be taken.  Thus, one small step … followed by another and then another is the way that we gradually build the stairway to our goals and ambitions.

 

“The way I think about it is, you know, this is, uh, you know, a great, uh, great country that had gotten a little soft, and you know, we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last, uh, couple of decades. We need to get back on track.” — President Barack Obama.

The gall is breathtaking, even from a man who as a presidential candidate said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.”

This from a President who, in chastising the rich, said, “I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.”

This from a man who, during the brief time he actually worked in the private sector, represented a black woman who accused a bank of redlining her out of a loan. The proximate cause of the housing bubble and meltdown is the notion that the “underrepresented” deserve a home, whether or not they qualified under traditional lending criteria.

This from a man who told a Toledo plumber that government should “spread the wealth around” by taxing “the rich” and giving the money to others, because “it’s good for everybody.”

This from a man who blasts any suggestion that young people just might be capable of investing a portion of their Social Security contribution into an account that they manage. Former Congresswoman and vice presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro, in opposing the idea, fretted for those who lack “the knowledge and the wherewithal” to handle the responsibility.

This from a flip-flopper who initially opposed the 1996 welfare reform — legislation that resulted in a 50 percent reduction in the welfare rolls, and without a corresponding increase in teen pregnancy. Then-state Sen. Obama called President Bill Clinton’s support of the federal bill “disturbing,” and a year later — on the Illinois state Senate floor — he said, “I probably would not have supported the federal legislation.” A decade later, when presidential candidate Obama was asked if he would have signed or vetoed the ’96 reform bill, he repeatedly dodged the question, insisting that he looked to the next 10 years, not the past 10 years. Then his campaign began running ads touting the reduction of welfare cases made possible by the 1996 reforms.

This from a man who blames corporations for “shipping jobs overseas,” yet shows no concern for the high corporate tax rates — rates that would be unnecessary were the federal government to actually stick to the handful of duties permitted by the Constitution.

This from a man who thinks it’s the government’s job to “invest” in “green jobs of the future” because the private sector cannot be trusted to take risks.

To the extent America has gotten “soft,” Obama can’t mean working hours.

The average American works longer hours than other people in the industrialized world, including the Japanese, the Germans and the British.

Nor does Obama, by “soft,” mean the growing and unsustainable reliance on government. In 1900, government, at all three levels — federal, state and local — took about 10 percent of the American workers’ pay. Today, if one assigns a price to unfunded federal mandates imposed on the states, government’s take approaches 50 percent. Obama and his party encourage government growth and expect Americans to depend on it for health, welfare and retirement. These are, they tell us, “human rights.”

So, let’s recap the President’s playbook.

Step one: Pursue a three-year course of extracting higher taxes; mandating costly new regulations, not least of which — in ObamaCare — represents a breathtaking expansion of federal power; and pass an FDR-like nearly trillion-dollar “stimulus” package.

Step two: Enact “look, we’ve done something!” regulations to “rein in Wall Street greed” — regulations that have nothing to do with the Freddie/Fannie/Community Reinvestment Act housing meltdown. Sign “credit card reform” laws that prevent bankers from raising fees on “the defenseless.” Never mind that banks roll their eyes and find other ways of keeping profits up. Funny how these bankers and other businesspeople seem not to consider their actions crooked. They think they operate in a competitive marketplace and owe a fiduciary obligation to shareholders to maximize shareholder return.

Step three: Let the investment community know that — because they represent the enemy — they’re a piggy bank from which government can extract more and more without, of course, eroding the business community’s willingness to risk capital. Expect the “greedy,” “taxed-too-lightly” business community to absorb the higher taxes and costly regulation — and yet continue to make the same hiring and investment decisions even as the White House vows to impose even more regulations and raise taxes even higher.

Step four: After succeeding in undermining economic growth through left-wing, redistributionist, government-can-capably-invest-in-green-jobs-of-the-future policies, accuse the business community of engaging in risk avoidance. Hammer them for “sitting” on “$2 trillion” in money. Tell them they should “get off the sidelines and expand. … Get in the game.”

Step five: Finally, accuse the American people of failing him, not the other way around.

We end with another quote from then-newly elected Barack Obama: “I will be held accountable. … If I don’t have this done in three years, then there’s going to be a one-term proposition.”

Larry Elder is a best-selling author and radio talk-show host. To find out more about Larry Elder, or become an “Elderado,” visit www.LarryElder.com. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

COPYRIGHT 2011 LAURENCE A. ELDER

DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS.COM

Article source: Creators.com

 

It is easy to become distracted by the long-term plans and strategic visions that dominate popular sentiment.  This is especially true in the midst of ’100-year business plans’ that were made popular during the 1980′s as companies rushed to emulate competitors from Japan that were realizing success.  This isn’t to say that strategy, vision, and long term plans aren’t important, but rather to say that their importance is held within the extent to which they guide decisions and actions in the present tense, and stay focused on the next step.

In both the realms of government and corporations, long-term plans are the cause de-jour that is the favorite topic of leaders and intellectuals.  In these situations, the most frequent use of a long term strategic vision is to distract attention away from the current deficiencies in performance that are plaguing the business or government institution.

Another way that planning problems can manifest themselves is when there are so many plans going on simultaneously that nothing can be done with any degree of focus.  In this situation, the important part is less about figuring out what needs to be done now, but deciding what does NOT need to be done now.  In many cases, defining what will be left undone or delayed until later is the link that brings priorities into focus so that they are not drowned out by other things that are urgent, but not necessarily important   Steven Covey made the observation that people’s effectiveness is destroyed by the ‘tyranny of the urgent’ where things that are important but not urgent are dismissed in favor of things that happen to be urgent, but not important.  This leads to an unfortunate situation where people become extremely busy, but never seem to get anything accomplished.

In order to span the achievement of both long-term strategies and short-term effectiveness, it requires that we tune our thinking in terms of what needs to be done in the short-term that is supportive of both long-term strategies, and representative of your most important priorities.