November 2012 Management Minute
“On Pruning Roses”
by Chris Reinhardt, feedlot specialist
There is a book by Dr. Henry Cloud called “Necessary Endings”(© 2010 HarperCollins, New York, NY) that I recommend for anyone who wants to start moving forward in their business or personal lives.
The primary theme of the book is about identifying areas of our work or personal life that need to end. By intentionally moving away from those areas we have the opportunity to control and improve the outcome of the ending, and of what comes after.
Cloud uses the metaphor of pruning a rose bush. A rose bush will make many, perhaps hundreds of beautiful roses, but to allow the bush to create a few truly spectacular, award winning roses, something has to go. So the gardener prunes the dead growth, and the diseased growth. But they must also prune otherwise healthy roses which do not have the ability to become great, but which are sapping resources from those roses that do have the potential for greatness.
We are all adept at pruning dead or sickly areas from our lives—those areas are usually easy to identify. But how many of us are able or willing to cut away areas that are actually healthy and thriving but which may be using precious resources that are needed by other areas of activity? Those activities may actually be wholesome and beneficial, but may not be moving us toward what we ultimately want our lives or business to be about.
Every person and every business is fully using 100% of their available resources; few of us would say that at the end of the week, month, or year, we’ve got a big, healthy reserve left over for more activities. The first step then is to critically evaluate what we want to be about: our core competency. Then evaluate what activities are moving us in that direction and which are not. Then we have the opportunity—and the obligation—to practice the precious gift of the art of saying “no”.
We all have limited resources. And we all have a vision for what we want to become, personally and professionally. By pruning the dead, the diseased, and even some healthy but distracting activities, we actually improve the likelihood of achieving that grand vision.