Have the guts to ship
You do more and more of your traditional factory tasks with automation. You’re an expert at acquiring raw resources and flipping it into goods for waiting customers. You have machines to do what machines do best. Thus, your value as a manager is reliant on your ability to communicate, negotiate and coordinate events with cohorts and select industry partners in a variety of sectors—inside and out. This includes, at least, IT, manufacturing, transportation and warehousing. By a simple, common measure, “you’re good to go” as long as the machines keep running. But wait, machines don’t bear responsibility, struggle with imperatives or keep promises. They don’t suffer from anxiety, fear or boredom. They don’t run risk, and they don’t start themselves either. You do.
Here’s a book for you—the author, Seth Godin, nearly insisted I share it. He calls it Poke the Box and it’s designed for people like you who need to produce things but perhaps forgot how to start things. The book, published in 2011, is a small, easy read and is written very efficiently in short quips. The writings offer ideas on how to be brave and instigate and provoke. Personally, I feel like a new set of spark plugs every time I pick it up.
Following are 3 excerpts I’ve carefully selected and edited for brevity. Enough to give you a grasp of the rhythm and pace of the book. Hopefully, it will be motivating for you: (Get your own copy at Amazon)
Fear on the left, fear on the right
Some of us hesitate when we should be starting instead. We hold back, promise to [think about it], wait for a better moment, seek out a kinder audience.
This habit is incredibly common. It eats up our genius and destroys our ability to make the contribution we’re quite capable of making.
[On the flip side] Some people deal with the fear and hide out by doing something else. They overstart, constantly dreaming up the next big thing, bigger than big.
It’s not good to be too fat or too thin. Not good to have blood pressure that’s too high or too low. It’s only in the center, where we resonate with the market and get it right that we can produce effectively.
The market is obsessed with novelty
So go make some. We’re tired of your old stuff.
Redefining quality
“Good enough” used to be the definition of quality. Your product had to be good enough to be considered.
Then the quality revolution hit and the market defined quality as “without defects.”
Just about everything on offer—from a car to an iPad to an insurance policy—does exactly what it’s supposed to. You turn the key or open the box and it works. Every time.
Things work so often that now we’re shocked when a battery dies, a car gets recalled, or we find a typo in a book.
Most of your competition is now without defects as well—which means that quality is not so interesting anymore. We demand it, but we don’t have to seek it out. If you have quality and they have quality and that’s all either of you offers, then you’re selling a commodity, and I’ll take cheap, please.
We have little choice but to move beyond quality and see remarkable, connected and new.
Remarkable, as you’ve already figured out, demands initiative.
Last word
Machines don’t have the guts to ship. But they don’t possess the will not to start either. You do. Poke the Box hovers around something we all need in order to be our most industrious. It’s a dare to be curious again, unafraid of failing, okay not feeling safe and willing to make a ruckus. Oh, did I give you the book’s subtitle? “When was the last time you did something for the first time?”
HIT Solutions believes the more your business keeps up with important trends, the more you will improve your product, and improve your bottom line.
Leave me your comments below; share your thoughts.