In his blog today, Seth Godin makes the point that people have their destiny in their own hands like no other time before. Seth says: “With so many opportunities and so many constraints, successfully picking what to do next is your moment of highest leverage. It deserves more time and attention than most people give it. If you’re not willing to face the abyss of choice, you will almost certainly not spend enough time dancing with opportunity.”
So when people just do their job or not even that, they really are not dancing with opportunity. It’s simply not enough to do your job anymore. For me, that’s a qualifier, to keep your job. Today you should be rewriting your job description because you know the role you play better than anyone else. (Or you should.) So who says the job description often imported from some unknown place suits your space. And when companies just react to clients’ orders without walking in clients’ shoes and predicting the future, we too should be fired.
Everyone has an opportunity to lead even if their job description does not say so. And this applies to companies as well. That’s why at pepper we have invested a huge amount of our time, for example, to learning the digital space, boxing “outside of our weight”.
Vijay Govindarajan who was in T&T last year at an Arthur Lok Jack Graduate School of Business Conference recently wrote in the Harvard Business Review: “A forward-looking CEO must do three things: Manage the present, selectively forget the past, and create the future.” (Box 1 through 3). Now use the three-box model to consider how to balance what you’re currently doing with what you need to do, and to free up the resources you need to do it. In most cases, you will find that you are overloaded on box 1, ie. things you do to manage the present. You need some box 2, things you can reduce or eliminate that are no longer relevant either to the present or the future, and some box 3, new things you will do to create the future.”
Individuals like companies, can’t only spend time on the present and the past. (box 1 and 2) We must allocate some of our time to “new things we will do to create the future” or box 3. We must dance with opportunity and we must also recognize and reward those around us who have the audacity to do so.
