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Manufacturing Luck

For sure, I am a lucky man. Great wife. Happy and healthy family. Some success in business as well. As a young man I sat next to an older guy on a plane. Conversation revealed he was a consultant. Interesting thought I. What does a consultant do? Helps business people to do the right things or confirms that the business people are already doing the right thing. How do you get to be a consultant? I inquired. Have a lot of different job experiences that help you to understand business issues from many angles and learn how to be good at most of those jobs. So, I did.

I think the lesson which has been most valuable to me is being able to identify when some action or direction is fundamentally inconsistent with the goal of the enterprise.  Then after identifying the fundamentally inconsistent action or direction, don’t do it or stop doing it. In its place, do something fundamentally in-keeping with the goal of the enterprise. This practice may not be the fastest way to get you where you want to be, BUT I assure you it will help keep you there longer.

I learned this lesson from my wife. When applied to business it always works. It is not always the easiest or the most entertaining way. Indeed it may not endear one to colleagues (bosses, peers, subordinates, suppliers, customers, etc…) who have some other method of getting ahead in mind. BUT when one makes up his mind not to just pretend he is doing the right thing, identifying pretenders and declining to become dependent upon them is a fairly straight-forward endeavor.

Pretending occurs when one knows or should know the facts and then takes actions as if those facts did not exist. The pretender then suggests to others these facts do not exist.  Some “pretenders” are just plain liars. They know it won’t work but lie to leave the failure with the unsuspecting. Pathological pretenders have actually convinced themselves and therefore actually believe they are sharing a workable plan with the unsuspecting. This style of transferring belief is pretending never-the-less, when one should know or should have known. 

Not becoming dependent upon pretenders is important. The way I figure it, I make enough of my own stupid mistakes. I don’t want to take responsibility and risk associated with pretenders who “bail out or disappear” when the going doesn’t suite their other ideas of how to get ahead.

You may have heard the phrase “good luck comes to people who work hard’. I am not certain that I have always worked all that hard to have acquired what luck I have experienced in my business life. In fact I have engaged in a good deal of really hard work and wound up in spectacular (lucky for me, short term) business failures. The failures were not the result of the hard work. The failure was inevitably the result of my pretending about some set of facts or another. 

If you want good luck; manufacture it. Learn how to identify pretenders and do not become dependent upon them. It might be a little scary as this activity takes away most of one’s excuses for failure. After all; failure is easier to explain away if your own failure is someone else’s fault.

One way to help identify pretenders… “If this guy had the responsibility to do the right thing on my behalf, does he understand it and will he actually try very hard to do it and not quit at the first resistance he experiences?

At your service,

Ray Windsor                                                              Facebook:            GermanMAESTRO Germany

President                                                                    Twitter:                    raywindsorlsc

Last modified on Monday, 11 March 2013 13:32
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