Thanks for the awesome comment. I have never heard of “shooting alligators” but I will be sure to use that one in an upcoming post (as well as the office!)

Great point about the ‘right-sizing’ and work-overload in corporate America. I think you are spot on about this and I experienced this first hand when I was crunching numbers in a cubicle. It seems that most of corporate management has no clue how to manage workload. AS the proverb goes - the $%#! rolls downhill.

I’m pretty sure that you’ll clip a few alligators as you make your escape from the corporate world!

Best,

Adam

great post - and oh-so-true. Greetings from Corporate America. Unfortunately I predict it will get even worse in the aspect of being in the “fire fighting business”.
The deep cuts in personnel in certain industries will lead to absolute work-overload of a few people - and the biggest crisis will get the most attention. And in turn the necessary groundwork of (new) projects will be more and more sparse which then will lead to more fires in later stages.

At one point in time at my work place an expression was created for this type busy-ness: “shooting alligators”. Imagine yourself on a tiny platform surrounded by 1000s of alligators who are trying to get you. Since you can’t shoot them all, you will pick the one that comes the closest and is the biggest.

So, have you been shooting alligators this week? Unfortunately my personal answer would be yes - despite planning and trying to avoid this exact scenario.

I will try to do better next week and I guess we’ll see how that works - although I can see the alligators closing in already…

Barbara

Thanks for the comment. You are right on the money. When I worked in corporate America, I think most of the people were busy for the sake of busy-ness.

Your plan & do approach is something a lot of entrepreneurs should take under serious consideration.

Best,

AJD

Great posting today. I know all of us see reactive-types everyday. When I was in ‘Corporate America’, I would come across many employees that were anxious to brag about how late they worked or how they worked all weekend because they were ’so busy’. I was not always impressed since I recognized in many cases they were trying to use activity as a surrogate for results. Now, as an entrepreneur I try to always remember the importance of ‘plan & do’, not just ’stay busy’. In the end, we all want better results and more activity many not get us there.

John Rohrbeck