Months of preparation have come to an end. The product has launched, the new manager has taken office, the restructuring plan is underway or the venture has finally received the green light. Then the first results arrive, and they fall far short of the projections: fewer customers than expected, a team still struggling to find its footing, expenses already mounting and revenue yet to materialize.
At that moment, it is easy to turn a business question into a verdict: Perhaps the entire idea was a mistake.
(Illustration: Shutterstock)
But an early result is not necessarily the final outcome, and one of the most difficult management skills is knowing when to give a process more time and when to acknowledge that its underlying assumptions were wrong.
The Torah portion Lech Lecha, in the Book of Genesis, begins with a great promise, but the reality Abraham encounters does not immediately resemble its fulfillment. He leaves his homeland in response to God's command to "go forth," arrives in Canaan and hears the promise, "To your offspring I will give this land."
Yet the land is already inhabited, and shortly afterward, a severe famine forces him to travel to Egypt. If we stopped the story at that point, it would be difficult to recognize the beginning of a momentous historical journey.
We read the biblical account knowing how the story will unfold. Abraham had to live it without that advantage.
The gap between a moment and its ultimate meaning takes on particular depth in Psalm 105. It is a historical psalm of thanksgiving, tracing the journey from the patriarchs through the Exodus from Egypt and the entry into the Promised Land.
Its opening section also appears in the Book of Chronicles, as part of the song of thanksgiving associated with King David's bringing of the Ark of the Covenant to Jerusalem.
This is important to understanding the psalm. David is not describing a particular crisis of his own. Rather, he is looking back on a process spanning generations, seeking to reveal continuity and meaning within it.
It is precisely from this broad perspective that the psalm returns to the most vulnerable point of the journey: "When they were few in number, of little account, and strangers in it."
The promise is great, but the people are few. The land has been promised to them, but they still live there as strangers. Someone who knows only that moment sees weakness; someone who knows what follows sees a beginning.
Rabbi Meir Arama, in his commentary Meir Tehillot, emphasizes the fulfillment of the covenant and divine providence over the patriarchs precisely when they were few and vulnerable.
The promise and the weakness are not two different stories, but two stages of the same story. That is why a journey cannot always be judged by a single snapshot.
This is also one reason the Book of Psalms offers such rich lessons in leadership. David does not merely offer answers to immediate personal distress. In the historical psalms, he performs a different act of leadership: He teaches how to revisit the past, reorganize events that once seemed disconnected and understand what was a stage along the way and what was truly a failure.
Leaders need both abilities: to move forward without knowing everything and, later, to look back and learn.
Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard famously expressed this paradox: Life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward.
For a manager, this is more than a philosophical observation. In real time, we do not have the information that will be available to us a year later. We must make decisions with an incomplete picture, making it especially important not to confuse a disappointing result with proof that the chosen direction is wrong.
At the same time, this idea must not become a justification for stubbornness. Abraham had a divine promise; our business plan does not.
A manager cannot explain away every poor result by insisting that "we just need patience." Persistence that fails to learn from reality can quickly turn from conviction into blindness.
The right question, therefore, is not merely "Have we succeeded?" but "What would it have been reasonable to expect at this stage?"
A new employee should not be expected to deliver, in the first month, the same output as someone who has held the position for five years. But it is possible to assess whether the employee's pace of learning is improving, whether the same mistakes are becoming less frequent and whether independent judgment is beginning to develop.
A new venture does not have to become profitable immediately, but it should begin producing evidence. Is there a genuine market need? Are customers returning? Are conversion rates improving? Is customer acquisition becoming less expensive? Does each round of experimentation teach us something we did not know before?
The problem begins when we judge a seed by the shade it cannot yet provide — or, conversely, when we continue watering a seed that is not sprouting simply because we have already invested time and money in it.
I experienced this tension in my own career.
When the possibility arose that I would become CEO of Fiber, a publicly traded company, I was apprehensive. The transition was significant, the responsibility considerable, and it would have been easy to compile a long list of reasons why the time was not yet right.
Yair Safrai, who was my chairman at the time, gave me simple advice: Don't overthink it. Take the opportunity.
In hindsight, thank God, it was a decision that contributed enormously to my professional growth. But at the time, I could not know how things would unfold. I had to assess whether there was a sufficient basis for taking the step, even without certainty that it would succeed.
That is also the test of management. Complete certainty is unnecessary, but there must be enough evidence to justify the next step.
The prolonged struggle surrounding InMode illustrates the other side of the dilemma.
When a company faces a takeover offer, shareholder pressure, a legal dispute and questions about valuation and alternatives over an extended period, its board of directors cannot settle for the slogan "We believe in the company's future." Nor can it accept the opposite argument that the mere existence of an offer means the company must be sold.
Instead, the board must reassess its assumptions. What has changed in the market? What is the alternative to a sale if the company remains independent? How does the proposed price compare with the company's potential? And what do the latest figures reveal that was not known at the outset?
Persistence is not an end in itself, and neither is changing direction. Both should result from updated judgment.
This idea also connects, for me, to the song "A Choice Renewed."
There is something about life, and certainly about management, that does not allow us to make a choice once and then rest. A major decision must be followed by a series of smaller ones: to continue, adapt, stop, accelerate or change.
The initial choice establishes a direction. Reality requires us to reassess it without immediately abandoning the conviction that prompted us to begin the journey.
That is why one of the most important tools before launching any process is not another optimistic forecast, but a clear definition of what we expect to learn.
If we establish in advance which indicators will show that our approach is working, when we will review it again and what evidence would require a change, it becomes easier to distinguish patience from denial.
Otherwise, every positive result becomes proof of our brilliance, while every negative result becomes an excuse for why it is still too early to judge.
A management tool: The progress test
Before deciding whether to continue investing or change direction, it is worth asking four questions:
- What should we have seen by now? Not the final outcome, but the signs of progress appropriate to our current stage.
- What have we learned that we did not know at the outset? If time has passed without any new knowledge being gained, we may simply be repeating the same experiment.
- Which assumptions have grown stronger and which have weakened? It is important to distinguish belief in the goal from blind loyalty to the method we chose to achieve it.
- What evidence would persuade us to change direction? If we cannot answer that question, we have probably built not a plan for learning, but a mechanism for justifying a decision already made.
The Torah portion Lech Lecha reminds us that the beginning of a great journey can look deeply disappointing in real time. Psalm 105 teaches that events sometimes take on a different meaning when viewed as part of a larger sequence.
But a manager does not have the luxury of waiting until the end of the story to decide. The challenge is to learn to read the journey while it is still being written.
The test is not whether the first result is good or bad, but whether what is happening now gives us a sound reason to take the next step.