Thursday 26 August 2010

Nobody is Practising Anything

If you run your own business or you run a department of a business what do you do every day?

Have you ever taken time out to think about what happens each day at work? 

A typical day for a sales person called John might look something like this.
09:00 Arrive, relax into their desk place and chat
09:30 Make a coffee
09:45 Open their email
09:50 Call their spouse to let them know they arrived to work safely
10:00 Go to the loo
10:15 Have a chat with office colleague
10:30 Reply to some emails
10:45 Post arrives
10:50 Read through post
11:00 Make first cold call
11:30 After 6 NOs on the calls they break for a coffee
11:45 Call their friend to make plans for the evening
12:00 Reply to some emails
12:30 Follow up on a few leads and quotes
13:00 Lunch Break
14:10 Back from lunch
14:15 Close 1 lucky deal
14:20 Celebrate by making a coffee
14:45 Drive to appointment
15:45 Arrive unprepared not really knowing anything about the potential client
16:15 Leave having had a great meeting
17:15 Arrive back at office to tell boss how great the meeting was
17:30 Head for home

Anyone running their own business has to make every hour of every day count. They could never afford to waste time in the way that John does.

But most small business owners aren't practising anything. Instead, like John, they are reacting to the day. To the emails that arrive; to the phone calls they receive; to the post that arrives etc. This is a fundamental flaw in most small businesses. 

Instead they should be practising every single day. Michael Gerber of eMyth Worldwide tells a great story about his saxaphone teacher, Merl. Merl told Michael if he wanted to be the best saxophone player in the world he had to practice 5 hours a day, 5 days a week.
One day he said, "Michael, you don't make music; the music finds you. Your job is to practice." 

And that is what Michael says we should do; practice, practice, practice - looking for the music, looking for the music. And one day after Michael had been practicing his saxophone playing for a few weeks, suddenly the music would just turn up, and all the hairs on the back of Michael's neck would stand on end and Merl would join in and play harmony. It was amazing. 

Michael says we can do the same in our businesses. If we practice the right things everyday, suddenly our music will show up.

So what are you practicing in your business? Don't be like John, who doesn't really practice anything and hopes and prays the music will show up for him.


Instead, practice the right things for your business. Don't react to the things that you know are going to happen everyday - email; post; phonecalls etc.
Make the things that don't usually happen, happen. Become proactive and see what a difference it can make to your business.

5 comments:

Jamie Forster said...

Some valuable advice here and and something that I am sure we are all guilty of at some point.

As the saying says, 'Practice makes Perfect'!

Jamie

John W Lewis said...

You are onto something here, Dickie!



This separation of different things is so important. There are things that we do and can control and are the cause of other things; those other things are not under our direct control, but we can cause them to happen as an effect of the first set of things.



For me this connects immediately with at least three areas in which this separation shows up.



The first is the area of GTD (which you might like); it is an approach to personal management which is attractive to many people. Your line: "If we practice the right things everyday, suddenly our music will show up." is so GTDesque!



The second area is flying aircraft where, depending on what one is doing, the instruments can be divided into two categories. There are "control instruments" (which are used as part of a short term feedback loop which includes applying inputs to the controls); and there are "performance instruments" (which used as part of a longer term feedback loop which includes monitoring performance against objectives).

The third area is playing sports, particularly something like golf. For example, beginners at golf often try to hit the ball upwards to get it into the air, whereas the experts hit down on the ball and the club does the job of getting the ball into the air.



This approach provides a separation between tactical and strategic activities in a way that seems to be applicable to many areas of of our lives.



But, Dickie, the thing that I think you are onto here is not actually this underlying approach to separation at all! It is your effective use of a story about it and its application (in this case, about learning to play the saxophone) that helps people to learn about it.



Great stuff!



John

dickiearmour said...

Thanks Jamie! We are definitely all guilty of it - myself included!!

;-)

dickiearmour said...

John,
Thank you for your comments and taking the time to do so.

I love your flying and golf examples and totally agree with you.

Thanks for liking my story - I cannot take full credit - Michael E. Gerber used the analogy while giving a speech in Leeds in 2004 which I attended.

Peter Kay said...

I love it, I suppose though you have to be practicing the right things. It is no use practicing how to play the piano if you need to be good at the guitar.

That's' the tricky bit though, knowing what what instrument to practice ;)

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