Comfort zones are okay if you need a rest. Actually, that’s a bit snide. You should harvest what you’ve sown, get the benefits of the expertise and momentum you’ve created, leverage your expertise. In fact, you should spend 95% of your time and attention focusing on doing what you know and do well, as opposed to spending most of your time flitting about like a blue-arsed fly. But to create a better and different result – to grow – you need to spend some time being uncomfortable.
Read MoreThe subtle variation on that is the story of the Vikings. When they invaded a new land (by the way, I loved Norsemen on Netflix, outrageously funny in a very Nordic way), they would burn their boats on the beach. This meant the only way they could get home was to pillage and colonize the territory so that they could build replacements. They added a little twist by taking their firstborn so that the only way the children would see their mothers again was if they were successful with said pillage.
Read MoreA couple of weeks ago I ran into a client from my time as a partner in a large business consulting firm. Rieny Marck and I worked together 20 years ago, and he was reminiscing about the Lumley Insurance journey.
I did some work with them over the space of about a year, starting with a vision and strategy session and then working through a detailed opportunity assessment and priority process. He still recalled the methodology I used, and my reference to something I called the “zone of sensible excitement”.
Read MoreMy GP is a fascinating man. He knows all these obscure things and treatments. He always likes to see me because I have exotic symptoms that he regards as a test of his trivia trove (and they are trivial). One of his trivia titbits is that there is a part of the brain called the locus coeruleus which is responsible for filtering out unwanted sounds.
Read MoreAfter 15 years I’ve worked out what we do here and why it works so well.
I’ve always practiced “outside in” – bringing the world to my inbox via subscriptions to bloggers, periodicals, newspapers and book reviews. This has its downside as a couple of them are American magazines (The Atlantic and New Yorker) and I can lose up to 20 minutes a day Trumping.
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