SAMPLE BLOG USED FOR TESTING SITE FUNCTIONALITY
I have just returned from meeting up with a guy I first met at a Leadership Academy meeting last week. He is remarkable in many ways: Firstly, having once been a professional singer/entertainer, he can hold an audience of any size – including me, sitting opposite him in a coffee shop; He is very clever, multi-talented and involved in many businesses – evidenced by the fact that he carries at least four business cards with his name on them; He wears his battle-scars extraordinarily well for his age – and has stories of business successes and disasters in equal measure.
He also confesses to being just slightly busier than he should be, managing and developing at least five embryo companies that consume most of his spare time, quite a large chunk of his personal wealth and even more of his personal energy. Despite all his business interests being potentially lucrative, he does not seem to be making as much from them as he deserves. Yet he seems to me to be very aware of his situation, and as happy as a pig in shit.
I think it is likely that we will become good friends. I have an affinity for clever, multi-tasking innovators and empathise completely with people who habitually throw themselves both feet first into everything that catches their interest. Charles Handy has a lot to answer for since he coined the phrase ‘portfolio working’. I don’t know who first thought up the term ‘serial entrepreneur’, but they clearly both had similar ideas in mind and probably deserve a good spanking too.
People with this sort of personality tend to take the view ‘because I can, I will’. It’s an extension of the old climbers’ rationale ‘Because it’s there’. Sadly, I find myself doing this far too often – If you catch me at it, please shoot me.
There are a couple of very important lessons to be gained from studying these people and their behaviour. The one that leaps out immediately is that if you have loads of good ideas, you need to be very good at delegating and have sufficient financial backing to allow you to do so.
The other lesson is much more subtle. That is, that you can’t tell an entrepreneur how he should run his business. I may be able to step in and tell a dozen ways to turn his ideas into cash flow or how to improve his return on capital. But what if he wants things the way they are? It’s his life, his time, his ideas, his passion.
These principles scale up even to the largest enterprises.
The classic business school strategy is to focus on the core capabilities of the organisation: Don’t dabble; Jettison every part of operations that dilute your return of capital or distract your managers. But the underlying assumption here is that the organisation exists to make profit – and that may not be the case. Even if it were to be a substantial part of its raison d’être, the ability to make money may be based on its ability to look after its customers, its staff and other players in its business environment. Many organisations function beautifully because senior managers know how to maintain a balance between the needs of both the stakeholders and stockholders.
Senior managers at The Post Office, take note.