Staying in Your Lane… Or Not

• Post By: Greg Crumpton
• Date: October 14, 2018
• Category: Blog
• Tags: #LifeLongLearning, Excellence, greg crumpton, success

Other than swimming, I never heard this term tossed around that much until recently. Today’s meaning, usually in corporate speak, is just mind your business and don’t get involved in things that are not “assigned to you”.

This morning I was walking around Charlotte on the way to the office and it just kind of struck me that all the folks on the “Bird” electric scooters were not in any lane. In fact, I was dodging a few on the sidewalk. Dock-less, wheeled transportation has definitely has its good points and a few not so good points, but that’s an article for another day.

As an interested and curious human, I really think telling one to “stay in their lane” tends to be a bit stifling. What if we all stayed in our lane all the time? How in the world would the evolution of concepts and entirely new concepts be brought to the forefront?

Curiousness, poking and prodding at stuff is exactly how things get enhanced. I’ll bet it’s how the telephone became wireless. It’s how e-mail was created. Basically, people have something bigger and better in their mind, a new way of doing things. I doubt if the cordless phone craver was a telephonic engineer. It was probably someone who needed to walk around the house and wait on hold when she realized the extra-long cord simply wasn’t long enough to make it to the back bedroom! Or, in the case of e-mail, someone decided that waiting 2-5 days for a letter to arrive via snail-mail wasn’t going to satisfy their delivery needs.

Thinking this through, I guess if you are running, say ADX Florence prison, maybe staying in your lane makes sense, but in general terms, let people have a bit of room to bump up against the edges. As I read about progressive companies, many allow for their folks to spend a bit of their normal working time cultivating new ideas and concepts. An example that many of us have read about is Google, they allow their employees to spend 20% of their time on “Skunk Works”-type projects.

If you can do so, poke the edges, figure out what’s next. If you are in a position of allowing your folks to do so, then allow it. Encourage some rambling entrepreneurship. This isn’t a liberal plea for less big-brother or less accountability. If you know me, you know that isn’t in my lexicon.

In reality, this is an invitation to create the next big deal, the next killer code or the thing that changes the face of our world. As a business owner, I endorse this process with vigor, yet I have the responsibility to make the dollars work at the end of the day. It can be done, you just have to outsmart the problem.

And if indeed I happen to bump shoulders with you while we are stroking it down the length of the pool, no harm intended, I just like to work the edges of what is expected.

Until next time, stay lissome.