“Planning to Prevent Failure”
Jeffrey J. Fox page 68 of How to Become a Rainmaker
That is all organizing is, planning to prevent failure. Trying to stay on top of my reading for the book club is not always easy. I seem to give away that time to eating, finishing a work project or driving somewhere. I still don’t own the value of it to the point where I will not give it up to everything else. I am not giving up on myself; I believe this is something I will continue to improve upon. This morning while I was reading this quote just jumped out at me. That is all that organizing is, it is our way of preventing failure.
Recently I was called into a situation where the client is a highly organized business professional, but the company had moved awhile ago and they did what any good business would do in that situation, they placed their clients first and the customers were never aware of any change in service because of the move. Behind the scenes, the business never had a chance to set up a new system in the new location. They left things in boxes, put things in file cabinets in no particular manner exactly and did a heck of a job creating functional systems from dysfunction. This grew and went on for a good amount of time, it was only when one of the owners could see that in the long run this system was going to fail, that I was called in. The owner was tired of trying to find time to get things organized, saw that large amounts of money they were losing in having to hunt things down and missing sales opportunities because things got lost in the pile.
“Organizing is planning for success and placing actions behind that certainty.” JoyGenea
For those of you who love to know how things work out on my projects, here is the rest of the story.
The owner and I had a one hour strategy meeting; the owner told me how the system needed to flow, what was important and what was hiding in the boxes. A couple of days later, after regular business hours, we rolled up our sleeves and sorted and purged like maniacs for three hours. When we called it quiets for the night, we had purged the reading material to something that could actually be read in a timely manner, the file drawers all had a purpose with the right files in them, there was one box of paperwork for the owner to sort now that the paperwork had homes in files and drawers and everything that remained on the desk was a priority for the next day. Those are actions for success.
*Just for clarification; failure is a perception that you agree to and/or society places on you. There is not amount of planning that can be done to avoid what it meant to happen, which might not have anything to do with what you want. Watch for posting where I dive more deeply into the above statements.
** photo from FreeDigitalPhotos.net