Authors: Henry Cloud
Certainly I am not saying that every time something is not working, it should end. In fact, it is usual y 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 wil 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 wil 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 il ness and sometimes evil are part of life too. Taken together, these three principles wil help you to make peace with endings, so that when their time has come, you wil 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, “til 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 wil 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.
Fal 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 wil ful y ignore these seasons. One classic example is the entrepreneur who begins a business through “sowing seeds” into a market: making cal s, 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, skil s 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 al of life and business is a start-up. “More, more, more,” is their mantra. That can kil 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 fal harvest.
Then, final y, 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 wil not think that “something is wrong,” but you wil accept the change as readily as a farmer accepts the turning of the calendar. Then you wil 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 stil 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 sel ing 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 cal s, 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 stil stuck. He is trying to make something work that is not going to work because its time has passed. And he wil 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 disil usioned, 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 kil ed 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 ful 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 wel . This second principle wil 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 al 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 al through life. There is a reason that the term “spring cleaning” came into existence and morphed to mean more than just cleaning, an overal 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 Bil 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 normal y 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 final y 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 real y manage about 140 to 150 relationships. Obviously not al to the same degree, but the system can handle that number, apparently. Who knows if life on the Internet and social networking wil 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 real y work wel are also very, very good at
not
having some, as wel . 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 al iances, and individuals drop out of some social ties.
These people have accepted a reality—that they generate more activity than they can fruitful y 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.