From Intellectual Understanding To Daily Practice

I find that most people know something about most subjects. To have someone make a big “aha!” isn’t part of the daily routine.

Yet the value is seldom in intellectual understanding, but in daily practice.

Years ago, I was running a weekly Sales Lab for some legendary sales professionals. The program was sponsored by a financial services provider who first wanted his people better, and then found that by opening enrollment they were getting a constant stream of referrals and new customers.

Over the years, we kept doing the same five things every week and everybody just kept getting better.

At the same time, I was consulting to a venture capital fund and the managing partner heard about the weekly meeting and wanted to attend. He was colorful, charismatic, and always behind in his sales.

He was bright and verbal, and many of the other participants already knew him. He jumped right into the exercises.

After, I asked him what he thought. He said, “I enjoyed it, and think I would do better in the advanced class.”

General laughter. The professionals knew there was no advanced class. This was like a martial art, where you just keep getting better at the basics.

Mastery is when my customer says, “We’ve always done it this way.”

When I was living in Marin County, one of my clients was an Aikido adept. He had been faithfully going to the dojo for decades.

I asked him how he measured the value from his practice?

He said, “Years ago, I was bicycling down the road with my baby daughter in the front basket. I hit a pothole, and the front of the bike collapsed. I was thrown over the bike, and was able to catch my daughter before she hit the ground.”

Mastery is not knowing how to do something. Mastery is performing when required.

Now, About Work....

Experience Causes Scope Creep

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen a customer develop world class skills using a tool, going from no presence to a highly customized, effective environment.

Then they run beyond the capabilities of the tool.

And they have to change.

Which is going to cost time.

And make everyone have to learn new ways to do the same things.

So they complain.

“If we had known this was going to happen, we wouldn’t have started with the tool!”

Nonsense.

That first tool took you from nothing to excellence. Instead of using 15% of the capabilities, you use 105%.

You figured out things the people who designed the tool didn’t know. And you surely figured out how to provide results that went way beyond your starting competence.

Some project managers want to design in a vacuum.

“Tell us what you want and we’ll go away for six months and bring you what you asked for.”

More nonsense.

Experience causes scope creep. The purpose of learning is a better solution.

If you have misguided managers telling you you can’t afford to do a better job, they are taking money out of your pocket, now or later.

Find some buckets to overfill. It will improve your total project average.

The Dune Leadership Lessons – Ancient Texts Of A Future

Three Rings or the County Fair

• The circus is all about activity and show.

• The county fair is about mastery and creating...roll up the sleeves, do it better, excel – pies, pumpkins, sheep, and prize-winning cattle.

Which has the lasting impact on everyone involved?

How to become wise in 5 minute increments –Rainmakers.

The Difference

Twenty years ago, my advertising agent told me that the difference between cheap Chinese food and expensive Chinese food was the size of the bill. We had been discussing where to have lunch.

That has stayed with me, but yesterday I got a whole new perspective on what it means.

I was working with a software developer, talking about the shift from enterprise software to open source, which led to a discussion about how technology could expand his company’s marketing footprint at much less cost. We’ve built an excellent direct sales program (well, what would you expect?), and I was encouraging him to further leverage his current market position.

He told me that he severely limited the time he spent thinking about his website, and wasn’t even going near blogs or Google Plus. His experience in the past was that he had spent unlimited time improving the company website and had nothing to show for it.

So he hired people who wanted to do that work, but they didn’t understand what the company was offering, or where it was going. His web presence wasn’t helping.

I’m all for delegation, and understanding mission, vision and execution is a lot more important than a discussion about using tables or stock photos on a website.

I am sure there are diners who can appreciate and savor the differences in Chinese food, but when I didn’t know what to expect, there wasn’t any difference.

How do you become a wine expert? Drink a lot of wine. 

How important is becoming fluent in better use of new communication technologies? Not very important, if you don’t care to learn. Perhaps more important to your successor? 

Where ave you had to develop you sophistication to win?