One of the unintended consequences of starting to work from my new garden office - still work in progress - is an appreciation of the importance of gardening, as everyday I my commute takes me past various flower beds all of which I noticed have started to become a bit unruly and unloved.
Inspired by an article in the FT by their gardening correspondent Robin Lane Fox on ‘pruning in late summer’, I’ve become mildly obsessed by ‘dead-heading’.
Dead-heading is, for the less horticulturally inclined, is the process of removing old / dead flowers from plants, to encourage them to re-flower. According to Robin Lane Fox with increasingly long summers in the UK, it’s important to dead-head to get more flowering through the later parts of summer (into September and beyond).
Excitingly I’ve already started to see positive results of my dead-heading work - with new flowers blooming from previously non-flowered plants (results shown below)
This started me thinking about how you might apply the concept of dead-heading to businesses. Cutting out the old to encourage the new? Interestingly dead-heading is about cutting ‘dead stuff’, the non-productive / past-it elements of a flower to focus the plants energy on new buds.
I haven’t quite worked out my thinking here - but I think there might be something in applying dead-heading to businesses . . .
