Moving Forward

I recently heard a quote from Gordon Bethune, the former CEO and Chairman of Continental Airlines.  He said “Do you know why a Boeing airplane has no rearview mirrors?  Because you don’t need to look behind you when you’re flying 500 mph!”  I love the metaphor; he is obviously saying don’t dwell in the past.  I agree with Gordon, but also believe the past is important.  As leaders, we need to understand the past; what occurred, what decisions worked well and paid dividends, and most importantly what didn’t work well.

Coming out of the worst recession in most of our lifetimes, from a macro level, we need to understand why we got into this mess in the first place (greed, overextending ourselves, unsustainable borrowing, etc.).  From a micro level, we need to review how we managed our businesses during the recession and what we need to change.  For example, at Axispoint, we placed several strategic bets - we actually invested our way through the recession.  Some of our investments have led to better than market growth coming out of the recession.  For example, we created a Named Account strategy that has truly been groundbreaking for us in terms of targeted selling and larger accounts.  Yet, we must not forget our failures.  At Axispoint, not all of our strategic bets panned out.  For example, we overextended ourselves in one particular region with a plan to build out and capture market share, yet we didn’t have the results.  We have done a deep dive into this broken path and have learned what to do and what not to do to deliver better results next time.

You have heard me say this before, good leaders aren’t perfect.  They make mistakes, but more often than not, their strategic decision making is sound and strong (they tend to be right more than wrong).  The best leaders look back, understand what did and did not work, and learn to build greater success and achieve superior growth.  So the past is important because of this critical learning, but Gordon is dead on.  We can’t dwell in the past.  We need to learn and move forward to drive to the next level!