Jim Collins shares a wonderful analogy called “Fire Bullets, then Cannonballs” in his book Great by Choice. It has stuck with me since I first read it years ago:

“Picture yourself at sea, a hostile ship bearing down on you. You have a limited amount of gunpowder. You take all your gunpowder and use it to fire a big cannonball. The cannonball flies out over the ocean…and misses the target, off by 40 degrees. You turn to your stockpile and discover that you’re out of gunpowder. You die. But suppose instead that when you see the ship bearing down, you take a little bit of gunpowder and fire a bullet. It misses by 40 degrees. You make another bullet and fire. It misses by 30 degrees. You make a third bullet and fire, missing by only 10 degrees. The next bullet hits—ping!—the hull of the oncoming ship. Now, you take all the remaining gunpowder and fire a big cannonball along the same line of sight, which sinks the enemy ship. You live. “

– Jim Collins

Any venture worth pursuing comes with risk, but what Collins proposes here—and what has become a core value of DashboardHC—is “intelligent risk-taking.” We calibrate with small bullets before firing off bigger cannonballs. This is paramount to successfully building and scaling a business—and most importantly it helps ensure that we are best meeting your needs.

Intelligent risk-taking is the approach we have taken while building—and constantly honing—DashboardHC.

And we’ve just fired a few more bullets.

The latest one being the redesigned look and feel of the DashboardHC app. To do this, we partnered with Danielle and her team at DNM to find the right bullets to fire for the design.