FINDING OUR BALANCE

“Spare the conquered and confront the proud.” 
-Winston Churchill

The volatility of today’s world can knock you, your organization, and perhaps your entire community out of balance. Economic, social, and political events can make it hard to stick to a long-term strategy, making it all the more important to do so.

Russia’s actions over the past week caused me to think again about the need to methodically reduce the dependencies and to simultaneously increase interdependence with trusted partners. When I think about these concepts and try to apply them locally, I find that we have much work to do. Is your community or organization dependent on just a few customers, businesses, or tax-payers? Are you spending enough time cultivating partnerships that could reduce that exposure and deepen relationships with a broad base of stakeholders? At an organizational level, are you too dependent on one strategy or tactic at the expense of innovation and diversification?

The past few years and the daily news reminds us that the world and our economy are changing rapidly, providing not only an imperative to act, but a great excuse to do so. My encouragement is to look at your revenue sources and closely examine the relationship dependencies so that you have both internally and externally. While it is a common task to do so, it is also common to push it off to another day and to ignore the obvious until it becomes an even larger risk.

Let’s take the opportunity this week to examine our dependencies, take time to deepen relationships, and make positive change toward our long term strategies.

-Kenny McDonald