Necessary Endings

I learned something very interesting this week. Roses in the wild never grow to its fullest potential and for that reason need to be systematically pruned.

The gardener constantly keeps a close eye on the rose bush, selecting careful the buds with the most potential and cuts away the rest. Only by this intentional systematic removal of lesser buds and branches can the rose bush reach its fullest potential.

Business seems to imitate life. If you’ve watched Gordon Ramsey’s Kitchen Nightmares, you will notice that the first thing Gordon does when saving an unsuccessful restaurant is to eliminate items from the menu. More options are seldom the answer to success. He will only choose dishes that the chef excels at and build a small menu around that. Most often the small, but excellent menu not only performs much better with the customers, but is also much easier to sustain.

Similarly in the biggest corporate turnaround the world has ever seen, Steve Jobs (at his return to Apple) reduced their product line – up to only 4 products. “We are going to spend all our effort and resources on only these 4 products, but these products will be the best in the world.”

As of this writing, Apple is the second most profitable company in the world, narrowly trailing Exxon Mobile, an oil company. I think that Apple would become the most profitable company in the world before the end of 2012.

Both Ramsey and Jobs realizes the key to success. In order to achieve great success we need to eliminate, rather then accumulate. Bruce Lee famously said: “The height of cultivation always runs to simplicity.”

There has always been a wrongful notion in business that great success comes from a great idea. The truth is, ideas are cheap and plentiful, and most often it is not the lack of ideas that leads to mediocrity, but too many ideas being acted upon. Chasing after too many ideas will more than often turn out in many “half arsed products”. Resources squandered chasing after good results but never achieving greatness.

The first step to becoming great is not a to-do-list, but a not-to-do list, most often you need to prune away branches in your business to make way for the few to flourish. In business as in life, we need to prune away the good enough, to make way for the great.