Today, we talk about the power of Momentum. We discover a process for consistently turning today's wins into the fuel needed to get tomorrow's results. This is an effective mindset for tackling complex organizational or relationship hurdles as you build long term Durability.
We are excited to discover, with you, the key commonalities and best practices that allow both public and private organizations from capital intensive industries to become stronger at managing their assets over time.
Learn more at: www.durablecapitalindex.com
Ben Parker:
Today we're going to talk about the power of momentum. Welcome to The Durability Podcast. This is for those that are passionate about helping their organizations plan and prepare for the inevitable future. My name is Ben Parker: management, consultant, chemist, creator, entrepreneur, co-founder, and member of the Durable Capital Group. I'm excited for you to join me as we discover what successful organizations do to build long-term durability. We explore the tactics and strategies that allow great organizations to combine the financial wisdom of asset management, the practical street-smarts of the maintenance subculture with the real world paranoia of managing risks to ensure their organizations blast. We uncover what great leaders are doing from all types of capital intensive industries to make decisions, build strong management teams and prepare to meet the future in whatever form it comes. This is The Durability Podcast.
Hello, everyone, welcome back to The Durability Podcast. I am grateful to be here. It is a beautiful fall day here in Boise, Idaho, and I am excited to talk about momentum. It's one of those things that we see in the physical world all around us all the time. And I've always been astonished with the number of physical fundamentals and principles that can also be likened to our business relationships, to our businesses and to our personal lives as well. Momentum is something that has been sticking in my mind lately because I have noticed that there are several critical principles that allow me to be more productive on a sustained level for a longer period of time. And ultimately get more accomplished, even in complex situations with lots of moving parts, lots of dynamic team members, or lots of various organizations that need to all be coordinated to be effective in reaching a specific goal.
And the reason I want to talk about it today is because I have really been impressed by those individuals who seem to keep the momentum going in their business and in their personal lives. These are those who find ways to not just renew themselves in terms of energy level, their excitement level, the things that they are able to do and accomplish, but also how they do it and also how they are able to inspire and help others to maintain that momentum as well. And a couple pieces that are just good fundamentals is that obviously we can't be in a state of high output, high energy all the time, 24/7. There are fundamental factors and variables that go into a high momentum environment sustained over a long period of time. And one of those is the ability to not only reenergize, but reprioritize and refocus.
And so a lot of those pieces actually have a lot more to do with not doing certain things and doing more of other things than they do just trying to do everything. And when you look at what really drives long-term durability into an organization, you realize that every organization has constraints. Very few organizations, if any, have seemingly unlimited resources. They may have a lot of some resources and not a lot of others, but all organizations struggle with the resource allocation. And when you have a lot of dynamic pieces, what is required to maintain progress, to make sure that the momentum of your successes feed the next round of work activity and progress so that ultimately you can reach your goal. And there are several fantastic examples of this. And I'm going to share a couple. One of the books that I've been really impressed with, and it's called Race To the South Pole.
And this is a book, it's more of a documentary, but it's just a fantastic synopsis of the classic expedition of Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott, and their tragic race to the South Pole. And in this book, it recounts the different approaches of both of these explorers. And the book itself is by Roland Huntford And it's a fantastic book. But it helps us understand this principle of momentum a little better. And there's been a lot of commentary on this specific example and how it relates to business. There's the concept of the 20 mile march, which was framed. And I can't remember which business commentator came up with the 20 mile march principle. I have to look that up, I'll put it in the notes. But the concept is that Amundsen was the Norwegian who ultimately succeeded in leading all of his men and his crew to the South Pole and back with ample supply and supply to spare, planned for every contingency.
Originally, he was heading off to the North Pole and a chance happening, the North pole got discovered before they could go. So they changed their plans on the spur of the moment and headed to the South Pole and put together a successful expedition very quickly. And it was one of those things that ... his strategy was to use sleds and dogs and be able to consistently do 15 to 20 miles every day. Good days, bad days, every day they had their system, what they would do, what they would focus on. And they had ample contingencies. Whereas, if you look at Robert Scott's expedition in comparison, they happened the same year and they were both racing to try to get there, the first race. And Robert Scott died in his expedition, failed in their attempt. And one of the biggest problems was, they were not as well prepared, they didn't think through their contingencies as well.
But their leadership style was different and the challenging thing is they would have these longer starts and stops. They would rest longer on bad days and not move any ... make any progress for all time and then try to make it all up on the really good days. And so they ended up running out of stores and food before they could make it back to their base camp or to their next food supply. And it ended up costing them their lives, which is tragic. But I think there's some really core, fundamental principles here that any of those involved in building complex things, in working with organizations that have a lot of assets at stake or high dollar value or critical resources were providing essential services, infrastructure. Those types of things that have a lot of risk that they need to consider in their planning. In high-risk situations, that principle of maintaining a consistent momentum, 20 miles every day has so much power over time.
And I've seen this in business where we start with simple, basic asset management practices or maintenance management practices. For example, a lot of organizations will buy equipment they need, very few are actually disciplined enough to log it, categorize it, use their CMMS system to fee into their financial system to allow them to make good long-term decisions on what they need to do operationally. Which essentially should lead into what they need to do financially to be more prepared. And so organizations that are looking at trying to build some of this critical infrastructure, I always tell them to start. It doesn't matter when you start, but you should start, in some degree now, and just build on that momentum. And use that momentum to keep making progress on the next thing and the next thing and the next thing. And that is one of those essential examples of how we can use that principle of momentum to change and grow complex things. And that's all I have for today. So thank you all very much. Thanks for listening. And I will have some more thoughts and insights coming next week. So we'll see you then.
Hey everybody, I just wanted to share with you something that has been super effective at helping organizations to really kickstart the conversation around how they're going to build a long-term durability into their management practices. And if you stop what you're doing right now and go to ww.durablecapitalindex.com, that's durablecapitalindex.com, you can sign up to take a very special assessment. This is the durable capital index assessment, it's a baseline assessment and it'll show you exactly where you're at currently with fundamental best practices for building durability. And it will give you a very detailed feedback report that you can take and share with your team. So if you go to ww.durablecapitalindex.com, sign up, take the assessment and share with your team and really start that conversation around building long-term durability into your organization.