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We are In-The-Moment people.
We love to engage in anything that comes our way that gives us instant gratification.
We all love pleasurable moments.
Notwithstanding this love affair with spontaneity filled with NOW! pleasure, there can be painful unpleasant results.
Here’s a scenario that everyone in business has experienced…
- You’ve just put your strategic plan to bed after gruelling days of hard work and acrimonious debate.
- You’ve decided on a specific direction that you believe will satisfy your growth imperatives.
- You get an email from a colleague who has a proposition for you to consider. It’s positioned as an opportunity that will add top line revenue or produce amazing cost savings.
- You want to take advantage of new opportunities and so you decide to go for it (plus, you know this person and are confident they will only bring you “good stuff” to consider).
- You call a meeting with your team to discuss the matter and the resources that will have to be applied to assess the new idea’s potential.
- You put other projects on hold since you don’t have sufficient resources to look at the potential new opportunity AND keep current projects on the move
- Since you’ve done this type of thing before, your team questions what the priorities are in the organization since they always seem to change when a new idea comes up.
- After a while, you observe little progress is being made on your strategic plan. Execution fades. Performance languishes.
What’s going on?
This is the spiral you experience when YUMMY presents itself—a new opportunity too good to pass up—and you decide to “Taste & Swallow” as opposed to “Taste & Spit”.
YUMMY is the over-the-transom work that begs chasing and distracts you from executing your strategy.
Successful strategies require focus and YUMMY is that temptation that wants to do exactly the opposite.
So be careful when you receive the invite to look at a too-good-to-be-true opportunity that isn’t contemplated in the strategic direction you’ve chosen.
Sure, on the odd occasion it might turn out to be worthwhile, but in my experience most of the time it’s a deadly waste (I’ve seen startups die because they chased YUMMY and forget their purpose.)
Taste and Swallow or Taste and Spit.
Be careful what you choose.