Happy Companies

Leopold Tolstoy begins the classic Anna Karenina with the wonderfully sticky line “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” (If you’re wondering how I came to be reading an Oprah’s Book Club selection, I wasn’t. I was reading Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which mentions this line as well.)

The line basically means that in order for a family to be “happy”, it must approach perfection on every front which, when viewed from the proverbial 50,000-foot level, makes every happy family virtually identical. Conversely, it only takes failure in any single aspect of familial relationships in order to make you all categorically unhappy. Because this single point of failure is often unique to every family, you could say that each unhappy family is distinct or “unhappy in its own way.”

As I was ruminating on this wonderfully concise nugget of wisdom, I realized that you could apply this reasoning to practically anything in life, but particularly in business. In order for a company to succeed, it must get many, many things right. In order for it to fail, it only needs to get one thing wrong. It’s like a minefield out there; it only takes one misstep to get your leg blown off.

The upside is that every decision you make that doesn’t kill you (or hurt, maim or paralyze you) brings you one step closer to business success. I’m a firm believer in the fact that perfection is inevitable on a long enough timeframe. Granted, not every judgement call has immediate, obvious repercussions, so you could be dead for a long time without really realizing it. Generally speaking though, if you made a call, and you survived the backlash (if any), then congratulations, it was very likely the right one.

I think about this now in the context of the next few months (which, believe me, is one of those subjects that can really keep you up nights), and have a million questions on my mind. We’ve already established that our financial situation is not particularly stable at the moment, so our options are limited by circumstances.

syndeo::media exists to build its own, internally-spun web products, but we’ve come to the conclusion that our current resources will not be sufficient to properly support all our ideas. The strategy now becomes fairly obvious: over the next few months, we continue looking for client work and refining our process. Once the appropriate resources present themselves, we can apply all our learnings to our own brands.

It’s a long-haul kind of strategy, but I can fake patience as well as the next guy. Certainly, funding from a third-party would be very helpful and we’ve already got a long list of things we want to try if and when an investment is manifested. For now though, we’re a young services company with a very thick idea folio. Feel free to hop on anytime