The end is the beginning

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?” Alice asked the Cheshire Cat.

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.

“I don’t care where –ˮ said Alice.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.

Having a clear goal, a destination, is really valuable in setting a sense of direction for any individual or team.

If you don’t know where you are going, any road will do.

The river is the goal

In recent weeks I’ve been doing a lot of “visioning” with senior management teams from diverse organisations – in food and beverage, white goods, energy, orchestras and international education. It’s always very interesting and engrossing work.

I think that having a sense of direction is useful, so long as it doesn’t become a straitjacket, getting in the way of responding to change in the competitive environment and within the team.

But much more important than the destination is the journey.

As the conductor, Vladimir Jurowski (currently in the middle of a Prokofiev fest in London), has said in an interview: “The way is its own destination.” And, paraphrasing Hermann Hesse’s novel, Siddhartha, “The river is the goal.”