Some Bushes Can't Be Trees — by Dan Lynn

By Dan Lynn

In 1998, I was promoted into a new VP of Marketing role at a Fortune 500 company and inherited a team of very talented people. They were great at what they did — traditional, old-world marketing. The problem was the year. It was 1998, and the Internet was about to rewrite everything. If our group was going to be relevant, I needed that team to become Internet marketing experts, and I needed it fast.

So I pushed. Hard.

My friend and colleague, Elazar Aslan, watched me do this for a while. Then he said something I've never forgotten: "I admire what you're doing — you're trying to turn bushes into trees. But just realize that some bushes can never be trees. They're bushes."

It stopped me cold. Because he was right.

He didn't mean it unkindly. A bush isn't a failed tree — it's a perfectly good bush. Elazar was telling a young, intense leader something I badly needed to hear: you can develop people, stretch them, believe in them — and you should. But not everyone can, or wants to, become the thing a particular moment demands. When you try to force it, you exhaust yourself and you're often unfair to a good person who was never going to get there.

The real skill isn't turning every bush into a tree. It's seeing clearly what you've got — knowing when to help something grow into more, and when to appreciate it for exactly what it is.