Motion != progress

A few years back, I attended an offsite brainstorm with my (former) company. We were a relatively small interactive development shop within a larger PR agency and felt we were being held back. This was sometime in 1999 when tech was flying high -- the PR side of the business was just coming out of a slump, we were bringing some significant non-PR clients and felt our team was not reaping proportional benefits from our revenue. If I remember correctly, one of the flashpoints was not being able to get sufficient bandwith at the office, and how hard it was getting the PR side to understand why we even needed faster connections.

So the task at this offsite: how to better get the resources we needed to develop the business. The corporate big-wig/facilitator set us off and ideas were flying -- change accounting methods so we had more license to spend from our revenues, split from the company, nothing was off the table...

...until we presented to the facilitator, who in imploring us to be more realistic used these words to summarize our morning's work:

"Motion isn't always progress."

This wasn't what we expected to hear (particularly since the dude hadn't laid out any boundaries), but it's proved to be one of those lessons that stays with me.