A hail mary pass is not usually a sound strategy for winning a football game. Likewise, going out on a limb and taking a big risk is not usually a sound strategy for growing a business or turning it around.

Silver bullets, quick fixes, and big dramatic moves are tempting because they offer an alternative to the steady, disciplined process of moving down the field. And when the receiver catches the long bomb, it is awfully exciting.

In business, hail mary passes can be big mergers and acquisitions, big investments in unrelated new product lines, replacing the CEO with an outsider, or million dollar superbowl ads.

There’s a huge inertia to a business. Jim Collins compares it to a flywheel, a big heavy wheel that takes a long time to push up to speed, and keeps spinning for a long time after you stop pushing on it. I think he’s right. You don’t spin a flywheel up to speed in one momentary burst. It’s the steady, disciplined, daily push that builds a business (or a life) up to success. And that’s why the silver bullets, the quick fixes, and the big dramatic moves don’t work.

Three caveats:

1) Steady and disciplined does not mean avoid change. Change is usually necessary. Make your changes by trying lots of things in the smallest, quickest, least risky way that will let you know if they are working or not. Don’t go out on a limb with a big, untested change.

2) There is such a thing as a real emergency, when steady, disciplined action will not get the job done. Sometimes paramedics have to take quick, drastic action to save someone who is in immediate danger. If your business is in immediate danger (doesn’t have enough cash to make payroll, for example) there may be no steady, disciplined solution available. So get out the defibrillator when you have to. Still, grabbing the paddles and shocking someone’s heart is an informed, tested action, not the same thing as a desperate grab for a silver bullet.

3) There’s also such a thing as a dead end. Don’t do a steady, disciplined march to extinction. To know if you are facing a dead end, don’t look at how difficult things are now, that is not a reliable guide. (There are easy paths to extinction and there are hard paths to success, and vice versa.) Look at the real, honest, long-term prospects of your situation. If there isn’t sufficient value down the line to justify the steady, disciplined work it will take to get there, end it and start something else.

Whether you are involved in a business (or project or relationship) that’s doing well and you want to take it to the next level, or you are feeling some desperation as the flywheel is slowing down, don’t be tempted toward the hail mary pass. Don’t strap dynamite to the flywheel and light the fuse. If you are not facing a bona-fide emergency, and you are not heading into a dead end, then take a deep breath, realize it’s going to take some time, and do the steady, disciplined, daily things that move the ball down the field. Often this means look at what’s working, and do more of that.

I’m trying to think of a lesson to be learned from this, but so far I got nothing. I guess mistakes happen in spite of our best attempts to avoid them.

At ATS Rentals, we rent audio/visual equipment via UPS. We ship equipment like projectors and camcorders to our customers, they use them, and ship them back via UPS. Sometime last year we decided it would be nice to include a single-serving roll of box tape with each box. We thought, if the customer doesn’t have any tape handy, they can use the tape to close the box for return shipping.

This probably should have occurred to us sooner, because we did get a lot of boxes back with odd types of tape on them. We got everything from blue painter’s masking tape to pink duct tape. Apparently regular tape was not around when our customers needed it.

Also, we re-use our shipping boxes to save money and trees (unless the customer opts otherwise when placing the order). All the weird tape was ruining boxes. So by including the single serving of nice, clear, regular box tape, we hoped to be able to reuse more boxes as well as increase customer convenience.

Unfortunately, most of our nice little rolls of tape came back unused, sometimes inside boxes closed with pink duct tape. Apparently our customers didn’t know what those little mini rolls were for. So we came up with little labels that said “Box Tape – For Return Shipping” and stuck them on the tape. That worked pretty well.

Around the same time we noticed another problem. Customers were throwing away the rechargeable batteries we ship with our video lights. They looked too much like regular AA batteries and when they were dead, people were simply tossing them. So we came up with a little label that said “Rechargeable – Do Not Discard” and put it on the packs of batteries. This worked well, and we no longer had to buy so many replacement rechargeable batteries.

So we were feeling pretty good about our little innovations, until a couple of weeks ago when something in labeling land went wrong. All our little rolls of box tape went out labeled “Rechargeable – Do Not Discard“. And sure enough, this week, boxes are coming back with all varieties of duct and masking tape on the outside, and nice, little, unused, “rechargeable” rolls of box tape inside. Yeah, kind of embarrassing.

I want to know how the customers who didn’t use the tape thought through this:

Hmm. Rechargeable tape. That’s different. It’s amazing what they come up with these days. I wonder how you recharge it? Do not discard… Must be expensive. Better not use it.

“Honeeeey, do you still have that roll of pink duct tape around here?”

One of life’s important balances is between short-term survival and long-term momentum. It applies in almost every context. You need short-term results to survive. You need long-term results to build momentum.

Some examples:

• A company needs to make sales for short-term survival, and can build momentum through development of new products.
• A household needs to make enough income to cover bills for short-term survival, and can build momentum through saving for retirement.
• A marriage needs basic civility for short-term survival, and can build momentum by having those deeper, tougher conversations.
• A college student needs to eat and sleep for short-term survival, and can build momentum by studying to learn new skills
• An entry-level employee needs to go to work today for short-term survival, and can build momentum by preparing for and applying for a management position.
• A factory needs to repair broken-down equipment for short-term survival, and can build momentum by replacing worn out equipment with newer models.

Here’s the trouble. Survival is always urgent. Long-term momentum is never urgent. What’s worse, doing something for the long term usually makes the short-term more difficult. Studying is harder than partying. Saving is harder than spending. Research and development is harder than making another batch of the same product. Long-term gain often involves short-term pain. Human nature is short-sighted, and pain-averse. Making room for the long-term is not natural.

In fact, many of us do this backwards, often choosing long-term pain for short-term gain. We borrow from the future for a more comfortable today. Misuse of consumer debt and poor choices about eating and exercise are common examples. A company slapping it’s trusted brand on inferior products for short-term profits is another case of the same thing. The long term results of this backwardness are devastating. With money it leads to bankruptcy. With health it leads to disability. Not good stuff.

Wisdom means looking past today, past tomorrow, all the way to the end of the story. Zoom out. How does what you do today affect next year, next decade, your life’s legacy, and eternity? Making choices for the best long-term result is hard. It takes maturity and the ability to tolerate discomfort. But the rewards in life and business are huge.

All you have to use today is the short-term. We all gotta eat, so go ahead and do some short-term stuff today to take care of that. But, if you can, organize things so you have some time and resources left for building momentum. What part of today’s short term will you invest in your long term?

I recently created a web-based dashboard for myself and my employees which we call the “Performance Screen”. It currently shows 23 measurements on simple bar charts including production volumes, employee attendance, customer satisfaction results, even how many pieces of scrap and trash are left on the production floor at the end of a day. Anyone in the company can view it from any computer. Here’s a partial screenshot:

Working from this screen, we’ve seen performance improvement in areas that have bugged me for a long time. Here are some lessons from my recent experience with this:

• Use specific, objective measurements. It’s hard to argue with numbers in black and white.
• Use technology to minimize cost of information. If it takes a lot of manual work for managers to pull together relevant performance data, it’s not going to happen often enough.
• Put a reminder system in place so measurements are taken and recorded even when management attention is focused elsewhere. In our case, to ensure consistency, our computer system requires employees to complete scheduled monitoring tasks before it allows them to clock out.
• Make short feedback loops.  When changes in behavior are reflected on a chart the same day, reinforcement occurs much more effectively than when feedback comes at the end of the quarter.
• Keep records over time. The system has a better memory than I do, and that helps. As a manager, it’s hard for me to see trends and confidently and fairly grasp the overall picture without a clear record of performance over time.
• Encourage accountability through transparency. Because everyone in the company can see performance charts with a single click, attention is drawn to problem areas. And the system holds me accountable too. Confronting unacceptable performance is uncomfortable for me, but there’s no easy way out now, because flying under the radar is no longer an option for me, or for them.
• Use the data to make confident decisions.  With clear, objective performance data I can act decisively with less hesitance about misjudging or being unfair. These confident actions as a manager are where the value happens.

The concept of short feedback loops was the thought that motivated me to go ahead and spend the time to develop this system. It came from Seth Godin’s book “Survival Is Not Enough” about the parallels between biological evolution and organizational change.

I’ll update you in the future as I learn more about the benefits and weaknesses of this type of management system.

What performance measures are key to your success? Can you put them on a dashboard?

No matter what goal you hope to achieve, there is one thing you can do that will put you light years ahead of most other people who have the same goal.

Start.

By taking action, you transform your wish into a project. For every wish that becomes an active project there must be at least 100 that remain passive wishes. So put yourself in the top 1%.

Starting won’t be enough to get you to the finish line, but it sure will improve your odds.