Smith Magazine invites us to summarise our lives in six words - ‘Six Word Memoirs’. I thought, ‘Easy! I have the Edgeware motto, near enough to six words: make money, have fun, change the world. I could lose the article before “world” and that’s the six.’
But it didn’t sound good, didn’t ring true. So I turned the Edgeware motto into a set of six action-oriented questions: ‘Make money’ became, “Is it economically sustainable?’; ‘Have fun’ became, ‘Is it personally meaningful?’ and ‘Change the world’ became, ‘Is it socially responsible?’ And that gave me a better handle on the ’six word memoir’life-summary exercise.
And this is the first draft. Earned keep; Smiled often; Behaved honourably. I’m sure it’ll change as I give the exercise more thought, but these concentration/focus/decoction games can be very productive, don’t you think?
Everyone is coaching or being coached; there are life coaches, career coaches, personal coaches, fitness coaches, executive coaches, coaches for getting out of bed in the morning and coaches for getting to sleep at night. Why do we need coaches so much and so often?
Could it be that the old, well-worn and predictable pathways - any path to anywhere and every path to everywhere - are dsiappearing, the maps no longer even remotely relating to the territory? Are coaches our conceptual cartographers?
The success of any business is generally measured by results, be it products sold or clients booked. But when we, as entrepreneurs, judge and reward ourselves on the same basis we risk becoming:
- Paralysed – If nothing ‘counts’ unless it gets results, we are likely to spend more time trying to predict outcomes and less time doing and learning.
- Disheartened – Results take time, especially if you are starting a new business.
- Disempowered – We cannot directly control results. We can carefully plan and skilfully execute, but some days we just won’t get results (and others we will).
The solution: begin by rewarding action, not results. Focus on what you can control; make consistent action your goal; build momentum and motivation by celebrating effort; know that persistence will yield results, one way or another.
Did an Edgeware team-building workshop recently at the Logan Women’s Health Centre. The question: ‘Who’s your customer?’ elicited the usual response from not-for-profits: ‘it’s women, who otherwise … etc’. This is fine; these are indeed the clients of the service. But are they the customers? It turned out in conversation that the prime customer of the service was government, that is, that the core value exchange was ‘We give you funding (on behalf of *our* customers, the women of Logan) and you give us a service’. The women who access the service are in fact the customer’s customers, so the thing for the Health Centre to do is identify and recognise the (very different) needs of two customer segments.
This post is part of the Do Well Redux series.
Faced with placing his wife into aged care at a young age because of multiple sclerosis, David Conry formed and launched Youngcare to help create sustainable care solutions that reflect the needs and desires of young people.
He conceived, and continues to develop, this is innovative program by continually asking himself, “what would I want if I were in the same circumstance as the people I am serving?”
This is a powerful question, and is subtly different from attempting to think like our customers. When we try to think like our customer we set them apart from ourselves and may be tempted to rely on stereotypes. When we ask ourselves what we would want in the same position, we come closer to identifying real needs and the real value of our product/service.
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