Chasing the Bunny in a Blue Ocean

February 9 2010, 2:20pm

Whenever I write something, from tweets to blog posts, I re-post it to Facebook. My 900-or-so friends are very inclined to comment and reply there. Many of these friends are from the “real” world, but several are not. Most of the people who comment, I notice, are those whom I have met. In response to my eBook reader review, I got some discussion. One comment in particular drew me to want to write a longer post. Adam McKercher (I went to school with him) wrote a comment: I don’t know how you [...] keep up with all the “If Only” aspects of computer culture, the vastness and need for improvement, and constant revision is what ultimately lead me to change majors. I have to say, being in a business like this requires you to be able to look through a telescope, binoculars, bifocals and a magnifying glass, sometimes in the same sentence. Keeping yourself sane while doing so is… an exercise in the power of the human brain. I’m actually hoping to do less “microscope” level work in the future. I really like following trends and making recommendations based on my knowledge of some sort of understanding of the eco-system. At the same time, when I talk about following trends, it’s difficult to draw a hard line between watching trends and keeping up with the Joneses. If you pay too much attention to what everyone else is doing, it will end up influencing your medium-term decisions, and most critically, your day-to-day work. A former manager of mine had this illness: the “me-too” illness. My coworkers and I started calling it “chasing the bunny”, like a greyhound on the racetrack. We would be hard at work on something that we were told to do the previous week, and then we would get these mixed messages from our manager. Once we learned to ignore it, things were OK, we were able to focus on work. However, now we were used to ignoring our manager. This tells me that chasing the bunny is not a good management style. The environment we had was not agile enough to be able to make these changes in direction very easily. I guess a really easy way to avoid this is to have a great mission statement for your business or product, and create a very clear vision – the place you want to reach in 3, 5 or even 25 years. If you know where you’re headed, you won’t be prone to rubbernecking at your competition while you should be keeping your eyes on the road.

disqu