Resetting Your Compass
Picture this: It’s Friday afternoon. I’m in our Q3 quarterly planning meeting with my key leaders. We just finished a nice lunch after our morning session and are reviewing the Rocks that we set in Q2.
It turns out we only accomplished one out of six. But not only that, this was the second quarter in a row in which we had achieved similar results.
Our consultant, Tom, was there helping us through the process, and at that moment, he was giving us a locker room, coach-to-team-style, talk.
It had only been a few months since my dad had passed, leaving me in charge of the business. But in that vacuum, Tom had done a great job helping us create clarity around what mattered and fine-tune the organization strategically, operationally, and structurally.
“Alright. So, what happened? In January, and again in April, you said these were the things that mattered most in order for you to hit your annual goals.”
He paused—giving us time to let that sink in.
He wasn’t wrong. But we were getting hammered in the market and our focus had gotten redirected toward keeping our accounts afloat, which, unfortunately, had landed us in a lot of price wars with the bigger guys down the street.
“Tom, come on! Cut us some slack, man. We’re getting killed out there on pricing and we lost focus on the Rocks because we were trying to keep the business we had,” I argued.
He listened patiently and then replied, “Listen, I’m not the one to ‘cut you slack’ or not ‘cut you slack.’ I’m merely pointing out that you all put a lot of work into setting annual goals and determined that in order to hit those goals, you needed to focus on these six things over the 90-day period. As such, they are the most important things when it comes to where your focus should have been.”
I thought he was finished, but then he seemed to have a follow-up thought.
“And by the way, when did you start selling on price? When we were talking through your unique value proposition, you said it was: (1) Unsurpassed Quality, (2) Relentless On-Time Delivery, and (3) No-Touch VMI Program.”
Dang! He was right. We had drifted off course.
“No journey is a straight line. The plane drifts, wind pushes it, clouds block the way. But the pilot always resets the compass to the destination. Leadership is the art of the reset.”
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Good leadership requires clear vision for where you are going—personally, as a team, or as a business—along with the fanatical focus required to get there.
But let’s face it. We all lose focus from time to time, finding ourselves, our teams, and sometimes even our entire company off course.
Famously, NASA’s Project Apollo moon missions required what were referred to as Mid-Course Corrections (MCCs)—so much so that they were literally planned events during the execution of each mission. Why? Because the slightest deviation in velocity or angle at the time of launch could result in being thousands of miles off course by the time the 240,000-mile journey was complete.
And as true as we may find the statement, “No journey is a straight line…,” the hope is that we can get better as we go, just like the Apollo Program did. In fact, by the time NASA launched Apollo 11, three of the four planned MCCs were canceled because the trajectory was so precise from the launch pad.
Food for Thought:
Gino Wickman once said, “Vision without
Is our current course aligned with the things that matter most to our business?
execution is hallucination. When vision veers off track, a leader’s only job is to aggressively steer the team back to the vision.”
Take a few moments to reflect and ask yourself: Is our current course aligned with the things that matter most to our business—our mission, our vision, our values, etc.? If not, what steps do we need to take to recalibrate our trajectory and get back on course?
Follow Kevan Grinwis on LinkedIn
July 2026