Blog / Winning Business
Brian White, 2AM Club Hot, Topics Issue 9
Do you sleep soundly through the night? Or have you become members of the 2am Club? A mistery, valuable time in the middle of the night with only one activity: thinking!
It is a time when no contact is possible with anyone else (maybe other than confessed members of the 2am Club!). It can be the most valuable time. Reflection and contemplation are not easy during normal "activity" hours. Activity hours encourage us to “do” things.
Make decisions, make calls, plan the next event. Thinking about the basics of our businesses and the best thoughts. Is my business improving? Are we at the cutting edge? Are there signs of complacency coming in to what I do and what we are?
The basic questions. So easy to brush over but, paradoxically, difficult to grapple with.
Going back to university
Each year I attend a course at Harvard University in Boston with different business leaders. Perhaps the most memorable course I attended was one based on a “thin” book asking just some very basic questions. The attendees in my particular group came from all over the world (most, of course, from the US) and right at the start there was quite brutal “water fountain" anger regarding the prospects for the following course which was to be based on this book (that had already been sent to each delegate).
The comments were brutal. "I have come all this way and the whole course is going to be built around these very simple questions. Holy Hell! Don't people realise that I run a huge complex organisation? I’m here to learn more on how to handle the big issues. What are the new big issues? I'm wasting time focusing on all this basic information and questioning."
Suddenly the Forum leader, ignoring the taunts and the expressions of disgust, started asking these basic questions of the participants. It didn't take long before these leaders were stumbling and grappling and being evasive and contradictory in the answers they started to deliver.
Questions such as "who are your core customers?" were initially brushed aside with "well, that's plainly obvious". But when pressed to be specific it was bewildering how quickly the delegates stumbled. A session that many thought would only last only an hour or more was suddenly incomplete at the end of the entire week. Basic questions have the power to haunt.
Basic questions - essential conditions to joining the 2am Club. How many of us are of the opinion that, through experience, we now know it all and the only task we have is to teach and communicate with others in our employ? Forgetting that perhaps the most vital requirement in the business is for that leader to be personally at the cutting edge for him/herself.
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