Maybe you wanted to make sweet and sour chicken, but didn’t have a wok. Or you found a pulled pork recipe that looked divine, except that you didn’t have the Instant Pot the recipe called for. Perhaps you were going to invite some friends over for grilled chicken, but your grill wasn’t working. Rather than risk a less-than-perfect result, maybe it was best to wait until things were in good order so you could properly implement your culinary ambitions.
Or maybe not. Or definitely not. It turns out you should not wait until things are just right to start something new. Instead, you should act now, creatively, using what you have to move forward.
I learned this the hard way (and it was even harder for my employer) many years ago. We had a well-developed, highly technical product line supported by dealers throughout North America. And our products didn’t always work perfectly. We found we were always rushing to fix some nagging issue for a disappointed dealer, and always delaying our work on new products.
I was determined to break the cycle of defects in current products delaying development of new products. So, we stopped all product development for 30 days, prioritized the issues in the current products, and turned 100% of our engineering resource into fixing stuff.
The result? At the end of the 30 days, the list of things we could fix was no shorter, and our product development on every program was 30 days delayed – a gift to our nimble competitors.
The takeaway? Moving forward is messy and complicated and there are no shortcuts to working each day to adjust your priorities to match the new information that that becomes available each day. (We did, ultimately, dramatically improve the quality of the products we sold – but that took an organizational makeover to change how we thought about product quality – not just shrinking back to continue to do more of the same.)
You don’t need a wok to do great stir fry – use any heavy skillet, get it hot, and turn your food over as needed. Messy, but it works. You can make the pulled pork in any slow cooker, or even on the stove in a heavy pot. You’ll have to pay attention, but it works well. And don’t ever pass up an opportunity to invite friends because your cooking equipment isn’t in order. Change the menu (there are several options to buy great fried chicken in the Twin Cities) and tell your friends to bring the beer!