Coldplay, Stuttgart and five-alarm fires

As with so many lessons in business, I learned this one the hard way.

For years, I was terrible at distinguishing between "this needs attention" and "this needs my personal attention right now".

I cancelled too many vacations to admit to.

Tofino.

New York.

Nicaragua.

Countless others.

Plans abandoned because something came up at work that seemed too important for me to leave. 

And then there was Coldplay.

I had tickets to see them on a Friday night. I’d been looking forward to the show for months.

Then a customer had an urgent issue. A major pivot with a hundred moving parts that they said needed to be implemented ASAP.

So I gave the tickets to my assistant and stayed behind to deal with it.

Monday morning, my assistant shared something rather interesting.

The customer had been at the Coldplay concert.

Apparently, they had decided their urgent problem could wait until Monday.

Of course, I hadn't.

It's funny now.

It was considerably less funny at the time.

The lesson wasn't that I should have ignored the customer and gone to the concert.

The lesson was that I hadn't stopped long enough to determine whether the situation actually required what I was giving up.

Because sometimes it does.

As I shared in a recent newsletter, a few years later, I was in Stuttgart when an existential threat to the business emerged back home.

That situation wasn't an unhappy customer or a problem that could sit until Monday.

It was serious. It was immediate. And because of how things were structured at the time, I needed to be on the ground in Canada.

So I got on a plane.

 That was the right decision.

 Afterward, there were important questions to ask about why the business was structured so that only one person could deal with a threat of that magnitude. 

But at the time, those were questions for later.

In the moment?

Get on the plane.

That's the distinction.

The goal isn't to become less responsive.

It's to become more discerning.

Because Coldplay wasn't Stuttgart.

The leadership skill is knowing the difference.