A young sailor complained to her captain that the ship had not moved in three days. No wind, no current, nothing to do.
The captain told her to check the sails anyway, coil the ropes, and study the charts.
“Why bother,” the sailor asked, “if we’re going nowhere?”
“We’re not going nowhere,” the captain said. “We’re waiting well. A ship that’s ready moves the moment the wind returns. A ship that’s drifted moves only after it’s found again.”
Three days later, the wind came back. The captain’s ship was already trimmed and pointed. The others were still finding their bearings.
The sailor never forgot the difference between idle and ready.
Enjoy your August news2use; own your pace now, so you can celebrate it in December.
Regards, Dan
“Relevant & pragmatic ideas, tools and insights to play at your best.”
For You
August slows down. Calendars empty, inboxes stop overflowing, the usual noise drops away. What you do with this quiet time says more about you as a leader than almost anything you do in Q4.
Some leaders use it to disappear; understandable and often earned. Others fill it with busywork that avoids the harder question sitting underneath: What have I been too occupied to tackle so far this year that really needs to be addressed?
The quiet moment of truth isn’t about working through your break. It’s about noticing which kind of tired you are experiencing, the kind of tired that rest fixes, or the kind of tired that only clarity fixes. One conversation, one hour of undistracted thinking, one honest look at where you’re heading next; that’s often all August asks of you.
For You & Your Team
You and your team run an experiment each August, spoken or not. What happens when you are away?
Some leaders leave an out-of-office reply and quietly hope everything stays exactly as they left it. Some leave but stay tethered; decisions still run through them, even from a beach chair. A few leave their team enabled to decide, act, and even get it wrong without them. The difference shows up the day you’re back.
Do you return to a mild surprise, or a major one; a call made, an improvement where you’d have settled for a fix, a customer handled in a way you wouldn’t have predicted? And when you see it, is your instinct to stand behind it, or to quietly correct it back to how you’d have done it?
Your reaction is the real readout. Teams that stall in your absence are often just mirroring what they’ve learned happens when they act without you. Spend September looking at what you built before you left, not what broke while you were away.
For You, Your Team & Your Business
Most teams treat September as a reset, a resettling back into executive routine. Very few prepare for it. They come back to the same overflowing inbox, the same reactive rhythm, the same unexamined priorities when they left, just with a tan.
Leadership teams committed to an executive ownershift are more deliberate.
Before the calendar fills back up and folks return to the routines, they ask themselves three questions:
- What should we stop doing that we started only because it was urgent, not important?
- What worked in the first half that deserves more of our attention?
- What decision have we been avoiding that autumn (or our competitors) will force anyway?
A few focused hours spent on these three questions before September starts is what gets you ahead, while others spend the first two weeks reacting on their return.
People, Places & Technology
This year’s “End of Summer Reading Resource” comes in two forms. For some, Alfred Lansing’s Endurance, the account of Shackleton’s ship crushed by Antarctic ice, and a crew that survived anyway through leadership discipline under sustained uncertainty. For others, Bob Iger’s The Ride of a Lifetime, a quieter endurance story about patience, reinvention, and staying the course over a long career.
Different books, same claim. Endurance isn’t the absence of a plan going wrong. It’s what you do next.
Thought for the Day
“Readiness is what makes rest possible.”