Читать книгу The Female Leader - Sonja Becker - Страница 25

T

he following seven chapters describe all the stages in the development of a business up to the moment when the original occupation becomes a business. You have to cross these “seven bridges”-there is no way round.

The only alternative is to stand still or to go back. There is no compulsion: you will find yourself automatically on a higher level. That can be recognized from the mental development of the company, its state and your own state of mind. However once you have adopted the road to a self-employed career, it would be sad to back down.

Look at it as your preparatory phase before your personal big bang, after which you will get in on the act in the world of business and thereby realize your personal goals and become increasingly fulfilled.

The performance scale (see Fig. 1) outlines your business activities. The subsequent development up to the launch is not only intended for the planning phase, but for you to discover your mission, to set goals, to learn how to sell and to try out a succession of projects in order to test whether your dreams can be realized out there in the real world.

The lower half of the performance scale can be called the theoretical, the upper the practical. We prefer to talk about the conception and the action phases.

Our approach has nothing to do with numbers. If you are looking for a business plan you won’t find one here. Although we strongly advise you to make one.

A large misunderstanding in our modern discourse is that for example artists and other “woolly-headed idealists” in our society are prevented from doing business. In the case of artists, writers or theatre people, commercial success through entertainment, for example, makes them downright questionable. At the same time good artists have always been interested in money. Andy Warhol painted dollar bills and maintained that he had portrayed what he loved the most.

Fortunately today the paradigm is changing: you have to link your ideas to business or you won’t be taken seriously in the market. Your ideas, plans and dreams end up as a “hobby” in your back room, or your relations support you, “the great artist”, so that you can pay at least a part of the rent and the grocery bills? Can that be satisfying? Not just that.

Figure 1: Performance Scale no. 7 – Sage Learning Method ©

The old paradigm follows this very curious idea in our culture that creative people and everyone who follows their dreams and their sense of curiosity should have the grace to starve to appear credible. You can prove that you are not a “woolly-headed idealist” through projects. It would be fatal to let everything be driven in support of your dreams and dedicate yourself exclusively to this ideal. You turn your ideas into projects which will show how much energy is really invested and how many consequences this idea really has. Through projects you come into contact with reality. They are limited by time and yield a concrete result - possibly even real money without substantial investment.

These projects are genuine experiences and give you feedback whether your idea or your business is going in the right direction.

The “performance scale” doesn’t have dark and light sides. Imagine it as a tree. Every plant grows downward as well as upward. The roots which suck up the minerals are just as important as the leaves and branches. From the roots you can see how the tree thrives and prospers on all sides.

It is the same with the performance stages. They are the indicators of growth and health.

The “performance scale” illustrates the paths of individuals, organizations, models and systems along which it sketches the phenomena that have arisen. Before you begin you have to look deep into yourself in order to understand the reasons why you want to take this path.

These reasons are your values. All further stages are affected by them. We will start from the bottom. Every concept can be found in the subheadings to follow. Every chapter is devoted to a special stage. You will recognize yourself in these stages: possibly in the first, but it could be another much further ahead if you have already developed your business idea. Then it is amusing to read what you have already achieved - and stimulating for what lies ahead.

Because this is a book we have to portray the business stages in a straightforward linear manner. This doesn’t correspond to the “truth” of these individual stages – in fact they don’t exist separately but are linked together. All the things that you have “behind you” don’t disappear. Many moments of disappointment will resurface. You often forget why you undertook this long journey in the first place. Moments of surprise, small successes and large obstacles overcome enable you to recognize the goal once more and take you a step further, where you will have to reorganize things completely and change your system.

Imagine the “performance scale” as a hologram within whose deeper dimensions other processes shimmer which are the individual stages above and below.