Coloring Outside the Lines. Jeff Tobe

lead and the most important role. It’s that of Questioner.

      We must constantly ask ourselves, “What business am I really in? I hate to be the one to break the news to you, but most of you are under the influence of some type of business-induced trance! Most of you are having hallucinations! I don’t believe that the majority of your answers would be the REAL purpose of your business. None describe what you really do for a living.

      I think the purpose of all of our businesses is simply to attain and retain customers. If you don’t create and keep customers, tomorrow you won’t have a business. Agreed?

      What would happen if you stopped looking at your primary role in your business, as the provider of ideas? If you don’t have customers for whom to provide those ideas and if the ideas don’t work for the customers, it won’t do you any good. What would happen if you looked at your emerging lead role as becoming a Customer Attaining and Retaining Agent? When you think about it this way, several things happen. First of all, you aren’t tied to a specific product or service because all you are doing is creating customers and continually filling their needs.

      Thus, you have five roles. The main role is customer creating and retaining agent. The supporting roles are

       1. Challenge solver

       2. Solution broker

       3. Information provider

       4. Communication Enhancer

      Over the next few days, I would like to ask you to really delve into how you can take on each of these new roles in your businesses or your professional life.

       #3 Learn to Listen to the Environment for Whispers of Possibility

      Listen to ideas that your environment offers you. When you think about environmental factors that influence your business, you may think of technology, change, diversity, economy, natural disaster, aging of America, pollution, government control, crime, downsizing and so on. But look at these factors from a different perspective. Within each environmental challenge is an opportunity somewhere. You know, if the dinosaurs were able to do an accurate environmental survey, they may be around today! Dinosaur companies who are unable to analyze their environment and look for opportunities within it, face the same fate as the dinosaurs. We have to ask ourselves, what environmental factors have I been complaining about or ignoring that could present a real opportunity to create and retain new clients?

       STEP #4 Learn to Think in New

      Why is it important for an Olympic athlete to practice every day? To get better at it! We seem to take the basics for granted. How many people practice thinking in new ways as a real discipline? Very few. One of the reasons much of our world is in a quandary as to how to solve our many challenges, is because of this inability to think in a new way. Einstein said “Everything has changed except our ways of thinking.” We have to apply the same disciplines in getting ourselves to think in new ways as we do to getting our bodies into shape or in learning to play a musical instrument. So this fourth step in learning to see the invisible, is to make opportunity-finding a habit every day.

      Henry Ford said “Thinking is the most difficult work in the world and that’s why so few people ever do it.” Most of us are thinking the same thoughts in the same way every day and that’s why we may beat ourselves up for never having an original thought when we really need one. That’s because we don’t PRACTICE THINKING.