The Ocean

There is an old Italian proverb that I don’t expect you’ve heard although you’ve probably experienced.  It goes like this:

“Tra il dire e il fare, c’è di mezzo il mare.”

For those of you who don’t speak the language, roughly translated it means “between saying and doing lies half the ocean” and like many old proverbs, this one has endured because it’s spot on.  There are lots of great ideas that have amounted to nothing because of the ocean, that vast space between saying and doing.  We need to navigate those waters or drown.

Go back and look at last year’s business plan (which you probably wrote a few months before the year began) and then match it up against what really happened.  How many of those great ideas you had actually happened?  Of those, how many happened the way you thought they would?  Probably not as many as you would have liked.  It’s cold, deep, and wet out there!

We’re as much navigators and ship captains as we are executives and managers.  Those are not passive roles – if you go out on the ocean without a rudder and some form of propulsion, you’ll die.  Go without a compass, map or sextant and you’d be lost.  Yet many of us do just that – we “say” and then expect to get to “done” without actively navigating and without the proper tools.  You end up looking for the lifeboats that way.

What sea are you sailing today?