The Liberated CEO: The 9-Step Program to Running a Better Business so it Doesn't Run You

CHAPTER 1

CHART YOUR RHUMB LINE (PLOTTING A THREE-DIMENSIONAL VISION)

In this opening chapter, we guide you through the three stages of reaching your destination as a liberated CEO:

1. Establish a smart goal.
2. Pretest your plan for failure.
3. Build the milestones needed to attain your objective.

After all, without an endpoint, planning a route is kind of a waste of time. Or as the late management strategist and scholar C. K. Prahalad observed, “If you don't know where you are going, going faster doesn't help.”

In establishing your vision, you and your business need a line of navigation to reach your future; sailing has taught me a useful metaphor for thinking about what this means. When plotting a navigational course on a map, it may seem that the shortest sailing route between two points is a straight line. But that's wrong. Even if that route is over open water, with no hazards to speak of, you don't sail on a flat line between A and B. You sail on what mariners call a rhumb line. This may be counterintuitive, but the shortest line between two points is in fact curved, since the two points are not on a plane, but a sphere—the surface of the earth.

THE TRUEST COURSE IS NOT A STRAIGHT LINE

In establishing your vision, you and your business need a line of navigation to reach your future; sailing has taught me a useful metaphor for thinking about what this means. When plotting a navigational course on a map, it may seem that the shortest sailing route between two points is a straight ...