Last week I spent five wonderful days touring the Douro Valley in Portugal with my husband, my sister and brother-in-law. The spa/ hotel where we stayed had terrific service and accommodations; we ate fabulous Portuguese food and took several day trips to the visit the local wineries that are ubiquitous in this part of the world.

The views were breathtakingly gorgeous as we wandered around impossibly high mountains in a tiny little Volvo, attempting to navigate unfamiliar roads in a foreign country. Of course, given the remoteness of our location, much of our route consisted of narrow, badly paved roads, with cliff-hugging, nerve-wracking curves. For most of the journey, my heart was in my throat, because there were few, if any, guardrails to protect us from hurtling down the mountains, if we got too close to the edge.

Of course, the GPS unit we had wasn’t terribly helpful either, steering us wrong fifty percent of the time. Thank heavens for Google Maps! With the Map app and my Android we were prepared for the twists and turns. It steered us right every time, showing us exactly where we were and where we were going – including the shape of the roads coming up.

“This is amazing,” my sister said with awe in her voice as she looked at the smart phone, watching the icon as our car moved along the road. She downloaded it immediately to her own phone and credited it with saving her marriage during the rest of the trip 🙂 .

Then it dawned on me. Navigating steep, unforgiving terrain with countless distractions, dealing with technology that doesn’t work correctly, and negotiating with oncoming traffic is a lot like running a business. In the last few years of working with business leaders, I’ve heard more than one CEO grumble that there’s no road map for growing a company – let alone a “map app” for business – as I wrote in my last blog.

Wouldn’t it be great if there were? Not only would you know where you are along the path of business growth, but the right app would also tell you the specific challenges that you’d be facing AND give you some clue as to how to negotiate “the curves”.

Now for the Good News. There is one!

Stay tuned…I’ll be telling you more about the business “Map App” in my blog next week.  (For more on the Douro Valley, check out this link.)

And…if you’d like some assistance with charting your course as you plan for 2014, SAVE THE DATE for our upcoming “Mastering the Rockefeller Habits” workshop on Tuesday, November 5th in Philadelphia! For more info, click here!

 

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