It’s time to get high. All this stress and uncertainty, anger and fear is driving me to it.

I use to live in a place where it was easy and cheap to get high and so I got high quite often. But where I live now there are no mountains. Not even proper hills. Getting high here means first taking a drive.

Nevertheless I will do it, soon, because nothing else I know puts things in perspective quite like sitting high up on a mountain, where the fresh air blows in one ear and out the other.

When you’re that high, you can look into the far beyond and see forever.  Being able to see forever now and then greatly enhances your ability to carry on carrying on, because being able to see forever makes you realize that this too shall pass.

So, dear reader, do yourself, family and friends a favor. Get out, get fresh and get high.

Time for some inaction

Did you know there’s a bonus in being high? The bonus is that you’ll be practicing inaction. Inaction matters. Yes, you read me right. Doing nothing. Sitting. Maybe sitting and thinking – if you haven’t yet learned the art of empty sitting.

We’re at that stage of the economic cycle where I worry that there is too much execution in executive.

The term ‘executive’, as in chief executive officer, means having the power to execute, to make things happen. This begs the question ‘what things?’

Therein lies my problem. From a young age we are pushed to action by the questions adults ask. Have you done your homework? Have you made your bed? Have you done this, have you done that?

No one ever asked me ‘have you thought today, have you contemplated, have you meditated?’

Not only are we conditioned to act, executives are trained to act. Combine this with the current climate of fear, the fear of not doing enough, of not working hard enough, and what do we get? Executives who are not spending time contemplating a future beyond this recession.

Being unprepared for a recession is bad enough; being unprepared for the recovery is insane.

Time to simplify your focus

How should you prepare for the recovery? I don’t know what you should do, but I know what I suggest you do. I suggest you simplify your focus.

Remember Darwin’s key insight? (After all the fuss in February in celebration of his birth 200 years ago how could you forget?) Here it is again: Darwin believed that those who are most adaptable to change will survive.

Here’s the interesting bit. Many people, believers and non-believers in the theory alike, assume that evolution leads to greater complexity.

Well, guess what. Some experts argue that a creature can adapt by becoming simpler, not more complex. In other words, ‘survival of the fittest’ could mean ‘survival of the simplest’.

The debate is ongoing, but I’m not going to wait to see who wins – complexity or simplicity. A simplified life-style seems awfully appealing right now. (Come to think of it, so does a simplified organization. We used to call it strategic focus.)

You can’t stay high forever. (Blame it on gravity - what goes up must come down.) How you come down does matter. In mountaineering, success does not mean reaching the top. It means getting down safely.

Yes, the same applies to diving.  How you get back up is more critical than going down… because you can’t stay down forever.