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.

 

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.