How long is a piece of string?

Written by Leda Glyptis
10th February 2022

‘How long have we got?’ is a hard question to answer in life and in business.

The problem in business is that you just don’t know how much time you have

Don’t worry, this is not a piece about contemplating our own mortality. It’s pure business today. But thinking about time is just as important at work. In fact, in some ways, it is the most important question to answer in our businesses, irrespective of whether you sit in an incumbent or a challenger.

The pressure is real and the question existential: how long have I got to work out what to become, what to do and what not to do, as an incumbent in a world that is changing more rapidly than I can understand, let alone adapt to?

And for the challenger, the question is different but equally urgent: how long have I got to show traction, to prove out my idea, before I run out of cash or someone else gets to the peak of my chosen mountain first?

How long have I got in which time to do the things that need doing before all additional effort is futile?

It’s an impossibly hard question to answer.

And mostly we don’t know the answer so we don’t answer at all and turn our attentions to things we can answer even if they are nowhere near as important.

The problem is, even if we can’t answer the question, we need to be asking it again and again.

Because being actively and intentionally aware of the fact that time is a factor, even if we don’t exactly know how, helps add urgency to the mix. And urgency is the most frequently missing ingredient in corporates and start-ups that fail. And the absence of urgency is easy to miss, especially in a business where everyone is busy and dealing with things that are urgent. In fact, in the absence of urgency, you can still be very, very busy, but busyness does not a business make.

This is a good moment to point out that urgency is not made up of the things that are urgent, for the avoidance of doubt. Urgency is about focused intent. Urgency is about using time intentionally towards a goal. That means that sometimes, urgency will drive you towards things that are urgent. On fire. It equally means that sometimes urgency and intentional focus on achieving an end result may shift you away from the momentarily urgent towards something that is profoundly important.

This is not just semantics.

This is existential.

Knowing that time is a factor that we can’t measure should drive focus. And focus should be backed by urgency. Because when we figure out what we need to do, the question of ‘do we have enough time to do this thing?’ is the flip side of ‘shall we even bother?’

If you want to bake a cake but only have ten seconds on the clock, you don’t stand a chance.

A baby takes nine months to make. You can’t do anything about that.

The problem in business is that you just don’t know how long your nine months is and that’s why you keep looking to the world around you for hints of how long might be left on the clock: what is the competition doing? What regulatory dates are creating deadlines of their own? How are our customers behaving? Are they rendering some of our thinking redundant?

Are we relying on the luck factor a bit too much?

That’s a genuine question.

How would you know if you are relying on luck too much?

There are a few ways.

If you have spent the last ten years looking around you (it’s called ‘horizon scanning‘ when you are paying a lot of money for others to make you feel good about waiting and seeing but the end result is the same) in the hope that the answer as to what you should do next will become manifest fully-formed and low risk, then you are relying on luck too much.

And in a start-up, if you are stumbling from month to month, chasing each day’s urgent to-do list, having the meetings, pursuing every lead but without keeping an eye on your burn rate, being all ambition and pluck but no real plan other than ‘we will be fine’, then you are relying on luck. And you may get lucky. But I for one don’t like relying on Lady Luck. She is fickle.

I prefer things that I can count on and I can count.

And when it comes to business, one of the best such things is money.

Money is crystallised time. That’s a Douglas Coupland quote and one of the best descriptions of what money does for those who have it. That’s why incumbent banks feel they can take their time, by the way, because they have money. And there’s some truth in that. Or there was at least at the start of this journey. Now the opportunity cost is getting close to blowing up even the strongest balance sheet.

For start-ups, it’s more obviously existential.

You see your runway in front of your very eyes.

That’s why investment helps. Not just because it pays the bills. But because it extends the time you have in which to do the thing and, mentally, that is as valuable as having money to pay the rent and they are not the same although they are achieved by the same means.

That’s why valuations help.

It’s not because you and your mate Clive are now paper millionaires. It’s because someone out there believes in you enough to give you a bit more time in which to prove, to build, to think, to fix.

How long do you have?

That’s measurable in burn rate vs runway.

How long do you need though?

Weeeeell that depends. How long is a piece of string?

We don’t know and yes luck plays a part and that’s the point. If we knew how long we had it would be a whole different ballgame.

That’s why urgency is key. Because we don’t know.

That’s why intent is key. Because we don’t know.

But I will tell you what we do know.

A game of football is 90 minutes. If you score a goal after the final whistle has been blown, you didn’t actually score.

If you have a big pitch today, and you finish your demo tomorrow, you didn’t score.

If you spent the last few weeks of runway pursuing a single white whale opportunity while money ran out, you banked it all on Lady Luck. And it may work. And it may not. And you played that one close to the wire and that is not the only way to be. And all I am saying is I just want you to be intentional.

Because if we wind the clock back to the weeks and months before this pitch or this deal or this regulatory deadline, before things were urgent and on fire and they desperately needed intent, focus and urgency because they were important even then. Before they became urgent. If we are close to the wire, running out of time and hoping for a lucky break, I want you to stop and ask yourself: how did I let this happen?

Was it hope and unbridled optimism and naïveté?

Was it the belief that there was more time?

Was it bad luck?

Were you always fighting a lost cause here and time wasn’t ever enough? Maybe it wasn’t ever going to be enough?

But if you knew that, why did you not try something different? Something that stood a chance of success?

And if you didn’t know that why didn’t you force yourself to face into the hard questions?

How long is a piece of string, I hear you ask with more than a little impatience.

I don’t know and that’s the point. I don’t know how long you’ve got to do the thing you need to do, to be honest. You may luck out and get all the time in the world or all the time you need which isn’t always the same and, either way, what you do with that time is always the most critical thing.

But getting enough time is never a foregone conclusion.

The runway lasting until take off is never a foregone conclusion.

I don’t know how long we will have and that’s the point.

What I do know is that urgency is not the same as doing things that are urgent or trying to do important things only when they become urgent.

And therefore I know one more thing: no matter who you are in all this or what you are trying to achieve in your time on this earth or in this business, it helps to act and think and focus like the world is on fire.

Just in case it actually is.

Act with urgency, before it becomes urgent.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glpytis