This apt cartoon tells a very important phenomenon in our daily lives:

This is my reaction as I read:

Don't get stuck in what Prof. Don Sull of the London Business School often calls "active inertia"!

This phenomenon is best captured by what Prof. Don Sull of the London Business School has had termed elegantly as "active inertia".

In lay terms, it's just "unproductive busyness"!

Just as Tony Robbins is fond of saying:

“If you do what you've always done, you'll get what you've always gotten.”!

This beautiful picture of nature's amazing animals suddenly reminds me of something important I have learned back in the early nineties.

It's the 'Whac-A-Mole-Theory' postulated by innovation expert Lindsay Collier. In fact, back in the early nineties, actually he wrote a book on it, which bore the same title, in addition to 'Get Out of Your Thinking Box'.

For those of you who have been to the circus or carnival, it's a very simple game, whereby little plastic critters (moles), pop up out of holes, and you must whack them with a padded mallet to knock them back in the holes.

Unfortunately, to one's chagrin, they keep popping out.

This amusement game play seems to be fun and even therapeutic for people of all ages.

Transposing the game to the real corporate world, cubicle folks play the same game, but it has a different name for it, to which I like to call ''fire-fighting''.

Does it sound familiar?

This is exactly what Prof Don Sull of the London Business School has meant when he terms it as ''active inertia''.

To solve this seemingly dilemma, at least from a personal level, one must embrace the first three habits of Stephen R Covey's '7 Habits or Highly Effective People'... ''Be Proactive'', ''Having the End in Mind'', and ''First Things First''!

This has been my own personal as well as professional experience.