Читать книгу Coloring Outside the Lines - Jeff Tobe - Страница 11

THE HARVEYPRINCIPLE

How to See Invisible Opportunities

Peter Drucker, management guru, said “THE ONLY WAY TO PREDICT THE FUTURE IS TO CREATE IT”.

In these times of turbulent change, you have a unique challenge and a unique opportunity in front of you because you have the capacity to literally create your own future from scratch---literally re-invent it so to speak. You have to do this with your business or your responsibilities…re-invent what you do. In whatever industry or profession you find yourself, the need to shatter old models of doing business, is crucial.

The main principle of creating a more positive, productive and profitable

future is something probably fewer than one percent of you--at this point in your career—really understand. I certainly do not mean to be condescending in any way, but I assume that most of you have probably not taken the time to even consider this. This is a principle that, once you understand it, goes far beyond positive thinking, far beyond goal setting, far beyond any of the traditional rules of success. If you understand and apply this principle, you will never be afraid of the future. You will always know that no matter what happens, you can come out of it profitably and productively.

The number one principle in creating a profitable, productive and positive outcome is what I refer to as the HARVEY PRINCIPLE! How many of you remember the imaginary six-foot tall white rabbit, Harvey, from that wonderful, 1950 Jimmy Stewart movie of the same name? It suggested that perhaps the one with the imagination, the innovative one, was not the crazy one after all.

We have to learn how to see the invisible; to see the invisible opportunities where other people see only visible limitations. To see the invisible potential of the people with whom we work—to see the invisible ideas that change the world. The building in which you work, started as an invisible, intangible, idea in the mind of a single person. That person’s ability to see the invisible---what was not apparent in physical form---ultimately produced a structure. Every great invention starts in the mind—in the invisible. Every great entrepreneur sees invisible possibilities---untapped needs--- in a marketplace that needs to be served. The most important skill you can learn in creating your own future, is learning the HARVEY PRINCIPLE (like Elwood P. Dowd) and seeing what others can not.

Fortunately, many of your competitors are suffering from what may be an incurable and deadly disease. This disease is a mental disease not a physical one and no one has been known to die from it physically….only financially! It’s been known to be hazardous to the financial wealth of many individuals and corporations alike. Never fear! I have been able to diagnose this disease. Maybe you can arrest the symptoms—recognize them within yourself or your organization so you won’t have to pay thousands to see a specialist after it’s too late for you or your company.

It’s caused by a virus with the initials B.P.I.D.S.—BUSINESS PROFESSIONALS’ INNOVATION DEFICIENCY SYNDROME. BPID Syndrome is a mental infliction that will erode your profits very quickly and keep you office-ridden while your competition is feeling healthy and fit.

The Symptoms

What are the symptoms? I’ve discovered seven. As I describe them, see if they apply to you, your organization or someone close to you because you could be responsible for curing this dreadful disease and turn out to be a hero. These are the primary reasons that people are unable to see their “Harvey.”

#1 Internal Myopia

Are you all familiar with myopia? What is it? Near-sightedness. What happens with Internal Myopia is that you are so focused on the internal aspects of your organization—with the business itself—that you can’t see the environment. You miss what’s happening around you by failing to see the big picture.

#2 Ostrich Syndrome

Ostriches bury their heads in the sand while they leave another part of themselves exposed!

If you have the ostrich syndrome, you may not simply ignore reality, you may choose to deny it even exits. There are probably some of you who still deny the fact that information technology and the ‘cloud’ will change the way you do business. There are some people in your industry who deny the fact that their firm can no longer be everything to everyone—that you no longer can expect to gain a client for life. I’m not talking about you losing the client as much as I am about the client’s infrastructure being likely to change and leave you behind. They have ostrich syndrome.

#3 Past-a-Plegia

What this means is paralysis in the past.

This is looking in your rear view mirror.

“What was good enough for the company in 10 years ago is good enough nowadays!” I like to coin the words of a large automobile manufacturer years ago when they said “This is not your father’s Oldsmobile”. This is not the way business has been done in the past, yet I find so many organizations suffering from this syndrome. Little things hang around from the past to haunt us.

#4 Psycho-Sclerosis

If you have had any dealings in health care, you may recognize this symptom. It’s also known as “My way or the highway.” Today, I hear it manifest itself in organizations in the following ways:

“We’ve never done that before!”

“That’s never been done in this profession before!”

“Last time we tried that it didn’t work!”

#5 Feedback Immunity

Do you know anyone who is immune to feedback? Sure. This just doesn’t mean personal feedback from a superior or peer but, more important, feedback from the marketplace. There are those who choose to ignore this symptom because they are so married to the success of the idea that they are unable to process the feedback of the marketplace when it doesn’t work. Because we live in a ‘customer service oriented environment’, I think that this symptom has changed. We MUST respond to our customers’ feedback BUT we also have to consider how QUICKLY you respond. It can be something as simple as “How quickly do you return my call when I leave a message on your voice mail?”

#6 Expertitis

This occurs when you know so much about one area nobody can teach you anything new. You become convinced that all the ideas in that area or field have been invented so you might as well not think of any more.

There was a man in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office who, in 1899 went on a crusade to close the Patent and Trademark Office. He believed everything that was going to be invented had already been invented. Then he proceeded to ride home on his horse!

#7 Failure-Phobia

This is the fear of making mistakes. In his book Surviving On Chaos, Tom Peters talks about how “successful businesses are those who can fail fast and often”. Although most people are afraid of making mistakes, you can never learn anything without making them? Most people are not comfortable with the idea of making mistakes—of failing. Mistakes are a necessary byproduct of the whole creative process. Mistakes are opportunities for learning.

The Cure

There are 5 steps to curing this syndrome…to seeing your Harvey…to seeing the invisible…to seeing what others are unable to see. These 5 steps may seem very basic to you at first but, as any professional athlete—any Olympian—would quickly remind you, victory often comes from sticking to the basics.

#1 Learn to See the World Through Your Client’s Eyes

I would like to relate a story to you that illustrates this better than I could on my own. It’s from a book that many people have forgotten—written in the 1950’s by G. Lyn Sumner—called HOW I LEARNED THE SECRETS OF SUCCESS IN ADVERTISING. He tells a story that perfectly illustrates how important it is to see the world through your client’s eyes. As I share this, think about how you can associate this to your business:

“It makes no difference whether you are using a full page ad in a magazine or a 5 line classified, it is not the space but what you say in that space that determines the success of that advertisement. Let me give you an example: Our maid had left us and as was the custom in Scranton Pennsylvania, Mrs. Sumner resorted to the method that everyone used to get another one. She called up the Scranton Times, an afternoon paper and asked that the following advertisement be inserted in the classified section under HELP WANTED—FEMALE.

“WANTED—Girl for general housework.

727 North Irving Avenue.”

The ad ran for 3 days and nothing happened. It was repeated for 3 days more and when still nobody answered it, I made the suggestion that possibly the copy was at fault. Mrs. Sumner said, “All right. You’re an advertising writer. If you’re so smart, suppose you see what you can do.

I was very professional in my approach. I said it’s easy to understand. Here’s a solid column of Want Ads all reading the same:

‘WANTED..MAID FOR GENERAL HOUSE WORK’.

Suppose there is a maid in all of Scranton, who wants a position or wants to change her position, which one of these ads is she going to read?

Now, let us put ourselves in the position of the maid herself. Every client has some fault to find with the work we are doing. Every maid has some fault to find with her place of employment. And she has in her mind, her own conception of the ideal place in which to work as every client has in their mind their own perception of their own solution to their own problems.

Let us present our home and all of it’s attractiveness in terms of those selling points that will appeal to her. So, I prepared a piece of copy that read like this…

“WANTED…girl to do general housework in small, new home in quiet, attractive hill section. All hardwood floors—easy to keep clean. No washing. No furnace to take care of. Nobody sick. Large airy maid’s room. House convenient to 2 bus lines. Small family. Good wages. 727 North Irving Avenue.”

We placed that advertisement in the Times on a Thursday when most maids have the afternoon off. The first edition went on the stands at 1:00. By 3, the line of applicants had begun to form on our front porch. By 4, buses were erupting maids in groups at our corner. By 5, Mrs. Sumner had made a selection and the appointed one was happily at work in the kitchen a few minutes later getting dinner.

When I came home I got the full story and I proceeded to analyze it. “You see,” I explained, “this afternoon dozens of maids, dissatisfied with their jobs read that column of classifieds. And what did they find? They discovered the perfect place to work. The kind of place they’d been thinking and dreaming about.”

The trouble was that I didn’t let it go at that. Next morning, I went down to the office and told one of the men there what had happened. He looked at me hungrily, “Man! We’ve been without a maid for two weeks. I wish you’d write an ad for us”. I told him that if he would just give me the specifications of his home as a maid’s paradise, I’d be happy to. He gave them to me and, of course, by this time I was getting better at this sort of thing. I wrote an advertisement and he put it in the Times the next day.

What do you suppose happened?

Our maid went down and applied for the job!

This story does a great job of illustrating the power of looking at the world through our client’s eyes. As basic as this sounds, most of us do not do it! Most of us have no idea of how our customers perceive us, our product or our service. Every morning, take one minute by yourself and imagine you are one of your clients about to do business with you that day. What do they think of when they think of doing business with you?

Do they associate doing business with you as a pain or a pleasure? Are you just another vendor or employee? Are you a valuable, problem-solving resource on whom they can rely? Are you professional? And the key is to do this for each individual client and put yourself in their shoes.

#2 Understand and Embrace Your New Roles in a New World

Almost five hundred years ago, William Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage. All the men and women merely players. They have their exits and their entrances and each in his time plays many parts.” Many of us have been playing our ‘roles’ far too long and in order to create the future, we must re-write our script. I’ve identified five roles in my one-act play we call the future: one is the lead role and the other four are supporting roles. You must take on these roles in your profession if you are to be more successful. The four supporting roles are as follows:

1. Challenge solver. You no longer sell product or services. You solve your clients’ challenges. You sell an experience. You look for challenges then find different ways to solve them

2. Solution broker. In other words, you provide solutions. These may be solutions outside your normal realm. Your clients turn to you in this role because of trust and loyalty and they turn to you first.

3. Educator or information provider. With the speed of change, our clients—both internal and external---need to be educated. You can be an invaluable resource for your clients by positioning yourself as an educator and an information provider. The discount clothing retailer Syms, has a great motto by which we should conduct business: An educated consumer is our best customer!

4. Communication enhancer. This is also referred to as communication facilitator or communication reenforcer Perhaps your clients simply need you to listen, or perhaps your product or service will help them with their communication challenges.

Now for the lead and the most important role. It’s that of Questioner.

We must constantly ask ourselves, “What business am I really in? I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but most of you are under the influence of some type of business-induced trance! Most of you are having hallucinations! I don’t believe that the majority of your answers would be the REAL purpose of your business. None describe what you really do for a living.

I think the purpose of all of our businesses is simply to attain and retain customers. If you don’t create and keep customers, tomorrow you won’t have a business. Agreed?

What would happen if you stopped looking at your primary role in your business, as the provider of ideas? If you don’t have customers for whom to provide those ideas and if the ideas don’t work for the customers, it won’t do you any good. What would happen if you looked at your emerging lead role as becoming a Customer Attaining and Retaining Agent? When you think about it this way, several things happen. First of all, you aren’t tied to a specific product or service because all you are doing is creating customers and continually filling their needs.

Thus, you have five roles. The main role is customer creating and retaining agent. The supporting roles are

1. Challenge solver

2. Solution broker

3. Information provider

4. Communication Enhancer

Over the next few days, I would like to ask you to really delve into how you can take on each of these new roles in your businesses or your professional life.

#3 Learn to Listen to the Environment for Whispers of Possibility

Listen to ideas that your environment offers you. When you think about environmental factors that influence your business, you may think of technology, change, diversity, economy, natural disaster, aging of America, pollution, government control, crime, downsizing and so on. But look at these factors from a different perspective. Within each environmental challenge is an opportunity somewhere. You know, if the dinosaurs were able to do an accurate environmental survey, they may be around today! Dinosaur companies who are unable to analyze their environment and look for opportunities within it, face the same fate as the dinosaurs. We have to ask ourselves, what environmental factors have I been complaining about or ignoring that could present a real opportunity to create and retain new clients?

STEP #4 Learn to Think in New

Why is it important for an Olympic athlete to practice every day? To get better at it! We seem to take the basics for granted. How many people practice thinking in new ways as a real discipline? Very few. One of the reasons much of our world is in a quandary as to how to solve our many challenges, is because of this inability to think in a new way. Einstein said “Everything has changed except our ways of thinking.” We have to apply the same disciplines in getting ourselves to think in new ways as we do to getting our bodies into shape or in learning to play a musical instrument. So this fourth step in learning to see the invisible, is to make opportunity-finding a habit every day.

Henry Ford said “Thinking is the most difficult work in the world and that’s why so few people ever do it.” Most of us are thinking the same thoughts in the same way every day and that’s why we may beat ourselves up for never having an original thought when we really need one. That’s because we don’t PRACTICE THINKING.