Difficult Conversations Don't Have to Be Difficult

Chapter 1Turmoil

The Calendar

Ruth looked at her calendar and groaned. What she saw made her head pound and her stomach clench. Her laptop screen was covered in colors representing meetings from early morning to late at night. The packed days of back‐to‐back meetings extended weeks into the future. Ruth knew she could not keep up this pace and wondered why all her hard work was not producing the results needed to sell her company. Why was her team not able to accomplish the goals to do the things that would take BBDI, Inc. to the next level and allow her to take a much‐needed break?

Ruth had started Breaking Boundaries Data Innovation (BBDI) eight years earlier and built it into a multimillion‐dollar enterprise serving a global audience. The shared vision and mission of the organization was to create a world that relies on truth to make better decisions. The foundation of the company's data innovation solutions was software Ruth designed herself. She was proud of the partnerships she created to accelerate the company's growth and her clients’ growth. Now she needed her executive team to step up if they were going to accomplish the objectives set by the board of directors.

Ruth shuddered as she stared at her packed calendar. Time is a strange thing, she thought. When you are starting your company and trying to find clients, time moves sufferingly slow as you think about all the ways the business can change the world and also the ways it might fail. But after years of hard work ...