What We're Reading Now
Making Time for Shoes
24 February 2015
Allison and Rachel took time to reflect on where they've been in the last year and to think about where they're going next. (It's good to make sure the cobbler's kids have shoes.)
Tags: allison read, leadership, strategy, teams
Rachel and I do our best to make sure the cobbler's kids have shoes at Allison Partners. (Sometimes it’s hard to practice what you preach. Like the cobbler who sells shoes to everyone in town but whose kids run barefoot, every now and then it can be easy to shift our attention to what others should do and overlook our own stuff.)
One of the ways we make sure we have shoes is by periodically taking time away from the office to reflect, recharge, and plan for the future. Once a year we take a few days at Canyon Ranch in Lenox, MA. In between that annual retreat to think big thoughts (an exercise more traditionally called strategy articulation), we check in on our progress by visiting one of our favorite places in Virginia, Moss Vineyards.
As we looked out onto the snowy vista today and thought about where we've been in the last year, Rachel and I were proud of some hard decisions we had to make in 2014. We named a few things we're feeling uncertain about in 2015 and figured out how we'll check in on those things as the year unfolds. We celebrated that we're thrilled with our fulltime team and how each one of them does their best for Allison Partners. (We're so glad Rob Herman and Janie Kast joined us last year.) That's one of the reasons Rachel and I do this work. We not only want to help our clients develop great teams. We want to make sure we're members of a great team, too.
Finally we finished the day thinking about our words (that) matter. During our November 2013 visit to Moss Vineyards, Rachel wrote a post about the words you'll find on our office wall. Our new landlord recently made some improvements to the wall between our office and our neighbor, Focused Ultrasound Foundation, so that we'd have better insulation and soundproofing. Our words had to come down so they could patch and paint. We used this as opportunity to reaffirm that the words we have up still matter to us (they do) and to see if there were any words we wanted to add (we did). We hope you'll visit the Allison Partners office soon so we can tell you about the words that matter to us and help you figure out what words matter to you.
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