From my home office, I can look out and see my garden. It’s loaded with wonderful, terrible sights, sights that mirror much I find in many of our companies. You’d recognize it too.

There are roses speckled with mildew and rust from fog carried on breath of El Nino. Weeds have taken over many patches of dirt, despite fact that I have gone over them with a hula hoe. (For non-gardener, that’s a triangular hoe that saves your back while weeding. Supposedly, you scrub away at ground, loosening weeds –and anything else that stands in way—while leaving good soil behind.) The rogue cherry tomato plant however has taken off … again. Sticky green arms with tiny green/yellow fruit now stretch in all directions. The plant must have been gift from some bird that dropped a seed as it flew to a nest in pine tree. I didn’t think a cherry tomato would grow in that patch of adobe clay. My feathered seed-sower proved me wrong.

What I must do to get my garden back in shape, to make it world class and ready for competitive eye of my next door neighbor, is exactly what every leader must do: seed, feed, and weed. How I perform seeding, feeding, and weeding depends upon season, unexpected turns of nature, and makeup of my garden. Walk with me through my garden and you’ll see analogies for our work world.

1.Consider “season”. In today’s 24-hour, global economy, it would appear that there is no season, anything that distinguishes night from day. Grow, grow. Sell, sell. But smart leader watches sky, reads clouds, and can tell when there are shifts to indicate a new season. Bring products to market at wrong time or introduce an idea without understanding timing and “garden” can quickly resemble a piece of scorched earth.

2.Watch for trends. Read magazines like Executive Excellence, Fast Company and American Demographics. Subscribe to TrendLetter. Explore new planned communities and see how people are choosing to live. Study mail order catalogs. In these latter two areas, you’ll find a move toward “Main Street U.S.A.”. Sure, high-speed connections and technology are placed in home, but new designs incorporate walking paths, close-at-hand stores, and alleyways connecting homes. Technology will be used for information but technology backlash is for creating places of human, real-time interaction. Levenger’s, mail order catalog for unique office and library accessories, features rotary dial phones. The catalog copy reads, “You don’t have to program it!”

But what if I opted NOT to be patient? What if I panicked, burned dead-looking trees, cut off limbs, and retreated in disgust within my cocoon? Spring might NEVER come because my shortsighted actions jeopardized natural course of events.