Hunks of meat
I had the pleasure of hearing John Anderson tell the story of Con-Tiki not so long ago. He's publishing his memoirs shortly, and I recommend you get a copy - it's a great story and he's a great story-teller.
The story began when he was a young kiwi on his OE in London in the early 1960s. He'd been to Paris, fell in love with it and wanted to get back there but had no money. So he decided to organise a trip for a bunch of other people as a way of reducing the cost. He put up a notice in Earls Court, which was frequented by young New Zealanders and Australians. He advertised it as a 3 month camping tour of the continent for 19-25 year olds at 120 pounds. As he was putting it up a young woman from Adelaide told him that she liked the sound of it and would like to go. In a flash he said "Well you'd better hurry because there are only two seats left!" She said she would call her parents that night, and he told her that she would have to pay 50% in advance. Sure enough she turned up the next day with the money, which he used to buy the bus.
He sold all the tickets in a few days and was thus able to buy the camping equipment needed. His book is aptly titled "Only Two Seats Left", and I have no doubt it will be a great read.
There were a couple of other things he said which struck a chord. The first was that his top priority all through his career was his health. His observation was that if you didn't have your health you didn't have anything and you certainly couldn't run a business if you weren't physically well.
The second was that he built the business - which grew at an extraordinary speed - on the people he employed. But more than that, he would deliberately give them massive challenges. He described it as throwing his staff "hunks of meat". He hired people who were ambitious, and he gave them jobs that matched their ambition. For example when he decided to move into the US market, he charged his trusted operations manager with the job of building it from scratch. While he was involved in monitoring progress and providing support, the job of launching the company was his manager's responsibility. That individual went on to head a large organisation, and to this day he put it down to the culture of "hunks of meat".
It takes a brave person to hand over the exciting bits to someone else. But then, how else are your people ever going to learn to be as good as you - and ultimately replace you?
The Last Mile
The hardest thing we have to do is usually the one that's most important. There are things we don't want to do, but know deep down we have to. They're the ones that give us the greatest breakthroughs. And it's not the thing itself that gives us the breakthrough, it's the doing it.
Courage is not fearlessness. Courage is feeling afraid and not running away. We often find it when we are forced to act by external circumstances, when the status quo becomes untenable. But we have a fantastic capacity to adapt, to normalise situations which, to an outsider's eye, are ridiculous or tragic or both. It's much harder to be courageous when we don't have a burning platform from which we have to jump.
To walk that extra mile, we first have to know it's there, and then we have to take the first step. We go a long time in the knowledge that we haven't walked the last mile, but we are unaware (not conscious) of what the gap, the incompleteness in our performance, actually looks like. That's when we feel dissatisfied and stuck, and the most frustrating thing is that we don't know what completeness looks like.
At least that what's we tell ourselves. Because we really do know, at some level that we simply avoid acknowledging. Think of things you're avoiding, resentments you're holding on to, areas of nameless dissatisfaction, the things in your business that you really don't want to do, the places you don't really want to go. In what ways might this incompleteness hold you back? How does it translate into other areas? Can you honestly say you're giving your absolute best?
Here's the thing: to accomplish ordinary things you only have to be work within your current capability. To achieve the extra-ordinary, you have to be at your absolute best. Why you don't achieve your extraordinary goals is not because of the goal or the circumstances, but because you stop yourself from being your absolute best.
My fellow graduates of Landmark Education will recognise this journey. Once you've taken the first step on the extra mile, the impossible becomes a little easier.
Dr Mike Ashby
Managing your recovery
Blogging has had to take second place to stonking in these last few weeks. We've really seen a major uptick in our business since mid-September. On top of the recession we had to make a fairly major structural adjustment to our marketing machine, but we've put in the hard work and now we have a platofrm for a very successful 2010. It's a great feeling: almost everywhere we turn we're getting opportunities and achieving wins. More about that at a later date.
We're seeing our recovery reflected in our members' businesses as well, by and large, though some are emerging at different times, just as they went into recession at different times. Our new member numbers are driven by a growing sense that the recovery is underway and it's time to start revving up the mind and the business.
The new members have identified something very important: it's not going to be like it was. In other words, the end of the recession doesn't herald a return to the boom that we saw from 2002 to 2007. Whatever the economists say about likely rates of growth, plan for low slow growth. Whether that turns out to be right or wrong is irrelevant. It's a belief that serves us well because it makes us think about how we have to strengthen our value proposition in our markets.
In particular, we have to think about how to make our marketing machine work better, because we won't be able to float on the rising tide. There's a bit of a lag effect here too - most of our customers are still very price conscious, but they are ever so slightly more open to a "value" argument - ie, we may not be as cheap as Cut-throat Kev down the road, but our service/product is so superior that it will save you money/make you more money/make you happier in the medium term.
That's a conversation you couldn't have had even three months ago so you need to be thinking about how we can maintain your prices and demonstrate greater value.
This is a time to be thinking through your brand challenge: who do you want to be known to and what do you want to be known for?