Alice Revisited

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking Glass may seem like a manic trip of a children's tale on first glance. Our book club tackled this tale as an earlier read, and I joking pulled some lessons out to share at that time. Still, I was surprised to see an image and a quote from Through the Looking Glass in recent business meeting.

In "Through the Looking Glass" Alice and the Queen are running faster and faster without seeming to go anywhere. Exhausted from this, Alice says "Well, in our country, you'd generally get to somewhere else - if you ran very fast for a long time, as we've been doing." The Queen replies, "Now, here you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

So what is the lesson I am to take from this? If the business thinks this is important enough to show in a planning presentation, I have to show my boss and my management that I am running twice as fast for the good of the business. As the economy recovers, we must not appear to stand still as other companies may surpass us.