Course – ElPropósito4 min de lectura

How do you hold the course you have set?

How does an organization lose its way? One of the biggest risks many organizations run is making deep changes in the wrong place. Business strategy, for example, is a way for an organization to align its teams and its people around a single plan, one that lets them deliver unique value and stay in the market. Many corporate efforts like strategy are built on values, ethics and the moral commitment of every single person to achieving it. So what kinds of change can throw an organization completely off course? What makes a company yank the controls so hard that it loses stability and, let’s say it plainly, falls into a spin that can only end in a crash? Over my career I have seen teams, companies and individuals change something as fundamental as their values and end in complete failure. I have also seen major changes turn out very well when companies, teams and people focus their efforts on a shared purpose and a set of values that keep them on the right heading.

A heading is the direction a vessel follows to get from point A to point B. Anyone with real awareness and clarity knows that the heading sets the destination toward purpose. I am a private pilot by hobby and have loved aviation since I was a boy. I fly every chance I get, and one thing strikes me: airplanes are safe as long as the pilot does nothing to cause an accident, from keeping maintenance on schedule to avoiding unnecessary maneuvers. Do that, and the plane takes you from one point to another with no reason to fear for your life. It is well known that you are more likely to die in a car than in a plane crash. Back to the point of this post: many organizations lose their way when they change their values. I am not saying values should never be revisited to see if they still hold. The problem is that people rarely take real care to weigh the impact of keeping them as they are or changing them, and that is where an organization either holds or loses its course.

Companies that hold their course over time become institutions, and history shows that the ones that managed it did so by staying true to their values. I like the word enterprise in its broadest sense. I mean for-profit organizations, where some of you reading this earn your living, and I also mean institutions that set out along a line of thought precisely to do good for humanity. Think of the first apostles. What an enterprise they took on, and despite every hardship, because they avoided sudden swings of the helm we have an institution that has endured through the centuries. We need to recognize that changes come in small, medium and large sizes. Small ones may take little effort. Large ones, like reshaping a structure of values, take longer, and we may only see the results in the very long run. When they arrive, though, they arrive with great force and are hard to reverse once we realize what we have done.

It saddens me to see institutions that for generations stood for excellence and for the very best the world has to offer now carrying changes in values that were seeded long ago. It hurts to see how casually symbols that many hold sacred, myself included, can be insulted or meant to be. All I can say is that, like many others, these institutions have lost their way or are about to. We should look into these mirrors and recognize how many changes take root deep inside an organization, often without anyone noticing. The same thing happens in teams and in our own lives when we lack the basic knowledge to assess the impact of the changes we want to make. They may look good on the surface and prove disastrous in the long run.

The best way to hold our course is to be clear about our original purpose and to have the discipline to stay with it. Great institutions know their why, and so do the best leaders we have had and have today. They are very clear about their values and about what truly carries them, in the best way, to the end of the road. Only by doing good, the way we would want others to treat us, will we know we are on the right path and the right heading. To keep a plane from spinning and losing lift, all you need is to keep your hands on the controls and avoid abrupt moves. In the vast majority of cases, those abrupt moves are unnecessary.

Warm regards and all the best,

Rodrigo Baccaro

P.S. I dedicate this post to everyone who disagrees with the changes in values that many of the institutions they belong to have set in motion. I pray that the decision makers either step aside or soon regain awareness of what they are doing.

Author: Rodrigo Baccaro

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