Todd Kwon-Do

A Pear-fect Plan

As you can see, it is producing fruit! It’s exciting, but it’s also creating questions and quandaries. When do I pick this fruit? How do I ripen it? Is there anything I need to do for the tree so it doesn’t die? Also, I have noticed something else… look at these two pears:


The two pears came from different trees that are only about 15’ apart. The two trees appear to be about the same age and presumably the two trees get the same amount of sunlight, rain, and nutrients from the ground. So, why are the pears on one of the trees so much larger?

The trees are doing their jobs, so I decided to do mine. I got online and started learning about pears. You know what I found out? The difference between the two trees lies in the way they were cultivated in the early part of their lives.

It turns out that the best way to get bigger fruit from a pear tree is to pluck half the fruit off of the tree when it first starts to produce. Very simply, the tree has limited resources for growing fruit. Fewer pears means that each one gets more of those resources… hence, bigger, better fruit. Each successive season, you leave a few more pears on the tree until you have the tree producing at full capacity.

It all comes down to quality over quantity, and it occurs to me that as business professionals we can all learn from this.

I once had a new customer who came to us because the deployment of their new business management software was a total failure from management’s point of view. It was an expensive product to be sure, and it had every bell and whistle that the business could ever need. To be fair, the software was working… but the business hadn’t really seen any additional productivity or benefit from having it.

In the end, it seemed to me that the deployment flopped because they failed to thin the fruit when they first installed the software. New software almost always means a change to the way that the staff works. Rolling out the new workflow and software with 10,000 features left the employees in a tailspin. Everyone became a jack-of-all-trades and a master of none. The company would have been far better off if they had rolled out a few features that provided the most benefit, and turned everything else off.

In my experience, users tend to respond better to this. It is so much easier to master a few new features, and once people see how much easier their job has become, they start to ask management and IT for more. That is how you know when the tree is ready to produce more fruit.

So, the bottom line is this: in business technology as in nature, you need to be a little patient. Trying to do too much too soon only leads to mediocre results.

Now, does anyone have any idea what to do with 150 pears?

posted by Todd @ 9:26 AM