NC State of Business

Remember how much work it took to map out a road trip, back before you could buy a GPS receiver or before Google Maps and Mapquest and other computer-based tools became available? (I imagine some young readers might stumble across this blog and ask, "Road trip? Why should I go on a road trip if I can download all I ever want to know about a place from the Internet?" If you even thought about a question like that, please don't tell me. But you don't know what you're missing.)

Anyway ... consider the humble road trip. You are where you are, and you intend to get to where you want to be. And unless you are a complete free spirit, you probably have some idea of how you want to get there: so you plan your trip, at least in general terms. In general, you have two main choices: take the freeway, or take the scenic route. There was a time when the scenic route was the only route, before the Interstate Highway System (which was established in the 1950s, and only seems as if it's been around forever).

What route have you picked for your business? Are you on the freeway, or the scenic route? Were you on the freeway, but in the current economy have you decided to slow down and try to go around the construction zones? How far can I stretch this metaphor before it breaks?

In business, you usually want to take the freeway because it's more expedient. But sometimes the scenic route offers something better than simple expedience. Sometimes we take the scenic route because it gives us an experience we can't get on the highway, whether we really want to see the scenery (like driving through the mountains in the Fall), or crave the quiet, or want to stop at the little out-of-the-way restaurant that serves the best apple pie in the world. It's like the difference between watching a movie trailer and getting just an idea of what the movie is about, and watching the whole movie. It's the difference between reading a book review and reading the book.

It's important that we reach our destination, but sometimes the way we get there is more important. In business, for example, expedience can hurt more than it helps, if we reach our destination by being brutal to our employees as well as our competition, by cheating our customers or our taxes. We may decide that the scenic route allows us to reach the same destination -- success -- by doing the things we know are right, even if it costs us a little bit more to do them.

How are you getting to your destination?