Seth Godin had an interesting article, Managing Urgencies. Here's one of many money quotes:

The problem, of course, is that most organizations are on fire, most of the time....Add up enough urgencies and you don't get a fire, you get a career. A career putting out fires never leads to the goal you had in mind all along.

Several years ago one of my employees imparted this nugget: "You are always living in the long term." Even though all of the pressures in a normal job tend to be focussed on the immediate, to quote BSG Razor "You make your choices and you live with them. In the end, you are your choices."

The fires you face today are usually the result of decisions you made months or even years ago. Here's an example. I did a consulting project for a software company that found itself mired by failing projects. Years ago, they had made some fairly poor choices, such as hiring people that weren't quite up to the job and not instituting standard practices such as source control, release management, and code reviews. They had 30 different customers with 30 completely different sets of source code, and were fixing the same bugs (with different people) at every project. The CEO asked me to come in and do a "health check" on their processes. I was to present my findings at a board of directors meeting.

I did my presentation to the board. I explained what the problems were and basically suggested that since they had 30 projects that were going to miss their delivery dates by an order of magnitude, the best thing they could do was 1) Clean house and get rid of some poor managers, 2) Start using best practices, and 3) Stop all work and concentrate on building a single branch of their source code that would be relatively bug free that they could then branch out to their projects. All pretty standard recommendations for software projects in trouble.

This approach didn't seem revolutionary to me, but it wasn't at all what the CEO had in mind. I had totally misread the situation. He was looking for outside validation that everything was ok. Or maybe he just wanted some improved firefighting equipment or techniques. Perhaps he should have spoken to me before I went in front of the board, but he was busy putting out fires. In fact, the entire company was built on a culture of fire fighting. Employees that went to extraordinary lengths to fix situations that simply should not have existed were lauded as heros, and the few technical people that were pushing for change were just "negative." Years later, the company was sold at a "fire sale" (how fitting) and almost no one from those days is now with the new company.

It's very easy to get trapped into just looking at the current fire that needs to be put out. After all, when the house is on fire it's pretty tough to be thinking about installing the smoke detectors.

But merely moving from fire to fire is not leadership. A leader is someone that can guide change even while dealing with the day-to-day. If you find yourself unable to deal with anything more than the minutiae of your business, then where will you be in 5 years? I'll give you a hint: Even if you manage to stomp out these fires, unless you're proactive you'll just be fighting another set of fires.