By Larry Danberger February 11, 2017
Occasionally I cross paths with folks that announce their approach to work or life is to pursue the ‘low hanging fruit’.
In a business meeting, anyone using this term quickly identifies themselves as parasites — they expect others to put effort in so that they can reap the rewards. Or what may be worse, they can’t comprehend the efforts that must go in (training, planning, building, investing, nurturing), they just expect that fruit to be there! This short term thinking is deadly for any business, as it involves no internal investment. Watch the slow decay erode the business’s ability to compete and keep up with the world. With any luck they will eventually get out of the way or wise up.
You want proof? Just ask anyone who runs a fruit orchard. If their only activity was to pick the low hanging fruit at harvest time, how long would the orchard survive?
What these folks may be confused about is the approach of breaking down large projects into manageable components. Each component represents a group of tasks that can be accomplished with minimal risk and minimized resources. Accomplishing these components can look easy, hence the mistaken identify with ‘low hanging fruit’. But the components have been carefully planned out as steps to a desired outcome, they aren’t just hanging there by chance.
