“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.
Is our current course aligned with the things that matter most to our business?
Food for Thought:
Gino Wickman once said, “Vision without 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?
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