On missing the moment

A confession: this newsletter was supposed to launch last Friday but now it’s the following Thursday and I’m only just pushing send.

I wrote the first draft last week, clear in my mind about my subject — how the right strategic stories can shift and significantly improve perceptions of value. It’s a good point (in my view), but as I wrote it I started to question myself. Is this what this newsletter is for? Is this the tone I want to develop? Is it any good?

So I started again and began to warm to the work in progress. Until I didn’t. Somehow it didn’t quite feel like me. What, I thought, is the point of having your own newsletter if it isn’t written in your voice? I needed to try again.

And then yesterday afternoon I was talking to someone smart in a big media company about the challenges of delivering change in their business. One of the big risks, they said, is that we polish for too long and miss the moment.

Before starting my own business I spent a chunk of my working life in big businesses where polish and perfection were highly prized. We spent hours, days, weeks, sometimes months building rigour, structure and resilience. Getting people on board, managing our stakeholders, identifying the risks, mitigating them, planning. Polishing. And often it worked. It was an approach that, by and large, protected us. It often allowed us to do new, good things, but it certainly wasn’t fast. At the same time we were urged to be entrepreneurial — meaning, I think, to find new ways to make money rather than to become more fleet of foot. The desire and the structure sat awkwardly together.

These days I often work with creative entrepreneurs and business founders freed from the structural need to polish to perfection. Enthused by ideas, excited by opportunity, they’ve taken steps into the unknown to see what they can make of it. They’re not reckless: they understand the market they’re entering, the position they’re in and the direction they’re heading. They have a reasonable idea of what it will take to make it happen. They start unpolished but moving, positioned to learn, to develop, to create and to sell.

Things are often rocky in the early stages. It doesn’t always feel controlled; they may not be confident that they know what they’re doing. But step by step they learn by doing and succeed by building on what they’ve already got.

It’s not all trial and error. Getting it right takes discipline. An entrepreneurial urge to do new things, unchecked, can be chaotic. Constant change doesn’t give the core of your work the proper chance to breathe and grow. Uncertainty about direction can be confusing for others and, paradoxically, slow a business down. The trick is to explore in order to find your focus, not to avoid focus altogether.

We’re now at a time when the TV and digital content industries are moving faster than ever, and with market, technological and social change the pace is getting faster still. The risk of missing the moment is greater than it has ever been. Speed and agility, the willingness to start before you’re ready, a sense of direction and the desire to find your focus will be critical to where we go next. It’s what we’ll all need now, big business or small.

So here it is: my first, unpolished newsletter. I hope it’s not bad, but my greater hope is that it gets better and finds its focus and the direction I want to take it in: a newsletter that speaks to what it’s like to be a strategic leader in today’s TV and digital content industries. Oh, and to have a little bit of countryside in it. It’s my newsletter, after all.

My plan had been to tell you all about peak spring: the time in May when all around is green — the trees in full leaf, the crops grown but not yet golden. I would share the picture of the beech leaf I found that had been neatly rolled and sealed by the caterpillar of a small moth as a safe haven and food source until it emerged.

But now it’s June, and the heatwave down here last week has begun the shift to summer. You can miss the moment in nature too, so hurry up and get your elderflower — out in full force in the country and the city — to make cordial or elderflower “champagne.” Go careful on the homebrew: it gets fizzy with, as we’ve found in the past, potentially explosive results.

I don’t get on with creepy shows and films. I hide through a lot of the running time and jump at every scare. It’s stressful. And yet I’ve still been watching the tonally perplexing (it’s sort of a comedy), strangely compelling Widow’s Bay. It’s about to come to an end. What a relief.

Thanks for reading and see you next time.

Oliver Lang is a coach and consultant, and founder of Silbury, a strategy and leadership consultancy for the television and digital content industries.