Give It Forty Five Minutes At least!

As a Manager for a large restaurant chain I once attended a Management Training Seminar. One of the topics we discussed was our mission statement. We broke into groups and worked on a statement that the whole group would be able to rally around. The idea of the exercise was so that we could go back to our own restaurant and work with our team to come up with a mission statement of our own, that would serve as the core value of what the restaurant stood for. That way that we could focus on it to drive us forward. The group that I was in worked well together and pretty soon came up with a working mission statement. We all read it out loud so that we could experience the feeling of it and when the overall seminar leader called for the group leaders to say if they were ready, our group came to a grinding halt. One of the members of our group had an issue with the placement of a comma. It then took us forty five minutes to come to an agreement about the grammatical phrasing and structure of the mission statement. While we became frustrated with him we relised that it was important to him and the whole group to be able to negotiate and feel as though we all had ownership in the outcome.

We are now in one of the most difficult and challenging times in our history, I certainly do not in my 55 years remember a time this stressful, yet we expect two new Governments to step in and sort out the dilemmas that both have inherited in what would appear to be a completely unrealistic period of time. If six people in a group could get held up by a comma for forty five minutes on a simple mission statement which, was simply an exercise, then surely we must give those who are running Great Britain and America a little more than a year to sort out this horrendous mess which has taken eight years to get into. However we voted and however angry we are with the situation, allowing that anger to run over into pressuring change instead of negotiating change and working towards change will surely give us more of what we have.

I am not advocating one political party over another, but surely, given the quandary we are in it would benefit us to take the forty five minutes and do the job right.

Be Passionate, ask why!