One morning in dance class, a woman announced she would be going the opposite direction of everyone else. The entire class was quickly moving to the right. She was on the right side of the room and started moving quickly to the left. Luckily there were no collisions. And that came at a cost.  The participants were forced to pay attention to her instead of paying attention to what they were doing.

That’s the thing about going a different direction in business. Sometimes it is absolutely the right thing to do. You are charting a new path that will bring great things. But many times, it is just a distraction that confuses everyone. The key to knowing the difference is seeing a solution that your customers will love. And that will cause them to be excited and not distracted.

Sometimes the odds don’t work out the way you think they will. My gym socks are labeled for the right foot and the left foot. And while you would expect to pick up some of each when the laundry is finished, many times I pull four lefts before I find a right or vice versa. What are the odds?

The odds require a large number of instances to work. But in business, there may not be a large number of instances. There may be just a few. So, the odds don’t necessarily apply. That’s why you can’t rely on luck or the economy. You need to be good at what you do to achieve your goals this year.

I regularly talk to people before classes start at the gym. People share new classes they are taking or like, upcoming special offerings, and trends in apparel or conditioning.

Every now and then, someone will remark that they don’t get much of a workout in particular classes. Sometimes I agree, the class isn’t that tough. Other times, I’m surprised as most people thing the class is really hard. And that’s when I notice the people making the comments are hardly moving. They aren’t actually performing at the same level as the rest of the class.

The same thing happens in business. That’s why getting an accurate read of performance is critical to long term success. High-performing companies and individuals have dialed in the right metrics to judge their performance. How are you getting an accurate view of performance in your company?

On December 17, 1903, the Wright Brothers made the first controlled, powered flight by a fixed wing aircraft. While they weren’t the first to come up with the idea of aircraft, they were the first to develop the control system that made fixed wing flight possible.

People at the time didn’t think flight was possible. How could you possibly put people in a tube with wings and get them off the ground? Only birds were capable of flight.

Today, flying is a given. We need to get across the country or around the world, so we buy a ticket. We don’t even think that just over a century ago, flight was not possible.

It took those two brothers who didn’t have high school diplomas to figure out how to make the impossible possible. It is pretty amazing. And a good lesson that the impossible is possible.

I love getting together with people that are different from me – culturally, politically, stylistically, etc.  It helps me round my own thoughts, positions and approaches.  The conversation that I’ve had frequently with a number of different folks is how to balance idea generation and implementation. The trick is to have people who respect each other and seek to understand why things will work or not. When you get the right combination, you get many actionable ideas that get implemented quickly. How do you balance idea generators and implementers?