"You
can't be in the parade and watch the floats."
- Tony
Beets, Gold Miner
For Business Owners, Management and Coaches:
From Seth Godin:
"Do
you make your own paper? Do you start with wood pulp and mix and bleach and set
and produce the sheets you use? My guess is that you save time (and a lot of
money) and just go to Staples and buy a ream or two.
The
theory of the firm shows us that when people work together in an institution,
they are able to produce more than if they work separately. Pareto optimality
makes it obvious that if one person mixes the dough while the other bakes the
loaves, they'll get more done than if each did the whole job.
This
explains one reason why big companies keep getting bigger. They gain economies
of production and marketing as they specialize their workforce.
But
what about the small enterprise, the freelancer, the soloist?
The
web now makes just about every task outsourceable with a click. Not only don't
you have to make your own paper (or hire a paper maker) but you can have
someone process payroll and bills, design a website, answer customer calls,
schedule appointments and a thousand other things you used to need to do on
your own.
Which
leads to the key question: When you can outsource everything, what do you do? When you
can choose the kind of value you create, you are also choosing what you're
going to outsource and what you're going to do yourself.
Here
are three reasons to do something as part of your work, from worst to best:
- Because
you are the cheapest available worker. Because you need to do something,
and it's more profitable for you to do this task than to pay
someone else to do it. Because you can't find something more beneficial or
profitable to do.
- Because
people (clients) will notice when you do it. That might mean that
they notice your presence, or they notice the unique nature of what you
create (your art) or they will notice that you've learned something doing
this when it leads to you doing something great later on. Mario Batali
doesn't cook for 99% of his customers (physically impossible), and they
can't tell. And he doesn't design 99% (or 5%, I have no idea) of his
recipes, ecause we can't tell. In fact, the only thing people can tell is
that it's him on the TV, and that his decisions are guiding what his
organization does next.
- Because
you love it. Because the work matters to you, and this task, right now, is
the best version of the work you can find.
The
first step: your job is to make decisions about what you do. And my guess is
that what you do is make decisions."
Focus on the Essential things, the right things. The things that
will add the most value to your company and not the comfortable things, the
easy things, the reactionary things. Delegate or outsource those things.
All the best,Rick Wallace
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