A thought by Henry Cloud, from his book, Necessary Endings (p. 43).
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Your perspective and understanding are the keys.
Henry says, “That lesson learned helps boards move founders into other roles and bring in seasoned management. They do not have to approach it as if the founder is failing. It helps CEOs make tough decisions also, knowing that they are aligning their business with the natural order that they see unfolding before them. It makes letting go of a long love affair with a product line or a brand possible.
He goes on, “Blair implicitly believed in life cycles and seasons, and he saw that the long harvest that he had enjoyed for so many years was about to end. It was time to shut down and get out while the assets and revenues that were left still had some value. But more than capturing value from what was left, the real task was to get to a field that had some harvest in its future.
“And when he moved to selling bonds, he acted in accord with the new seasons. He accepted the tasks of winter, the death of his old business, and ‘retooled.’ He studied a new field and got his license. He cleaned the farm, getting rid of everything from the old business that would slow him down, including overhead and debt. He was truly making room for the new. That is what letting go looks like.
“Later he began to do the tasks of spring. He went out to sow. He made his calls, worked his contacts, and went looking for new prospects to plant in his new field. Sowing, sowing, sowing. As he landed them, though, unlike a lot of hyper sales types, he tended them as spring turned to summer. He nurtured those relationships and grew them. Slowly the trust grew and the relationships grew, but he did not just keep tending; he moved to making sales, to harvesting those relationships. And harvest he did.”
Henry continues, “Meanwhile, my other friend is still stuck. He is trying to make something work that is not going to work because its time has passed. And he will continue to try until the bankers and the investors come change the locks. It happens, and often it happens because someone doesn’t have a worldview that normalizes endings, which are built into the universe itself: life cycles and seasons.”
He then says, “And it is not only in business. Many marriages, for example, fail because the couple does not make the shift from spring to summer. Spring, the sowing time, is new, exciting, forward-looking, risky, stretching, and enlarging of both people. But after a while, the relationship has to be tended to—the tasks of summer. Some people do not make that shift, wanting the sowing to continue, and they become disillusioned, or in the alpha-male version, continue to sow elsewhere. Serial sowing becomes a pattern, and over a number of years, no relationship equity, no trust, is ever built. If they could see that sowing ends and the work of tending begins, they could harvest an incredible relationship that lasts for many more seasons.”
Oh, if we would only learn and understand the cycle of the seasons. It would make such a difference, wouldn’t it?
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