The Lean Takes The Stairs

One of my daughters is assembled, as near as I can tell, from five parts: magic, dragons, lipstick, ice cream, and wrestling.

Nobody ran that lineup past a focus group. Nobody walked her through the brand tension between lipstick and a body slam. She just picked, out loud, and kept picking, and now she sits on those five like a dragon on a hoard, smug and glittering and ready to bite. You could shop for her blindfolded. Meet her once and you know exactly what to bring up the second time.

Adults keep picking. We just quit announcing it…

Every old house has a floor with a lean in it. Drop a marble in the kitchen and it rolls to the same corner every single time. Nobody chose that corner. The house settled, and the marble obeys.

You have a corner too. Pull up the last twenty close calls you made, the ones that honestly could have gone either way, and count. They won’t split ten and ten. Nobody’s do. You are already leaning on every coin flip you touch, and the only open question is whether you picked the direction or the floor did.

I picked mine a while back. Sooner beats later. Cold beats warm. Saying it out loud beats swallowing it.

They aren’t laws, and I break them. I once swallowed a sentence in a meeting because I was the new guy and it felt like too much, too early. Then I found out who actually owned the decision and walked the sentence straight to them. The lean didn’t disappear when I broke it. It took the stairs.

Sooner sends invoices too. I went down at the track because I was rushing and put in just enough gas for a session, and the fourth lap found out exactly how much “just enough” was. (Yes, the gas again. That fairing has earned its keep.) There was no trial afterward. The rider who rushes is the rider I chose to be, and some days he costs a fairing.

Sides aren’t for the easy calls. When the facts run ninety to ten, the facts pick and nobody needs a personality. Sides are for fifty-one to forty-nine, which is where most of a week lives and every sleepless night does. A declared side is one decision that saves you four hundred. When it loses, you pay a price you agreed to in advance. When it wins, the joy has an address.

Companies lean exactly like houses. One that won’t choose between faster and cheaper, or louder and safer, still has a corner. Its customers find it for them, usually in a review, usually in words nobody in marketing would have picked. Most positioning work is just naming your own lean before somebody with a one-star rating names it for you.

If you lead anybody, your tiebreakers are worth more to them than your goals. A goal says where to go. A tiebreaker says what to do at the fork when you’re not in the room. I ship eighty percent right, on time, and fix the rest where people can see it… once a team knows that about you, nobody needs a meeting to ask whether the rough version can go out. They know which way you’d lean. They can lean for you.

Some of her five will get traded in eventually. Sides are allowed to move. The part I’d fight for is the announcing, because an undeclared lean still decides every close call you make. It just never signs its name.

Stay Positive & Call It In The Air