TIME & MONEY HOW TO SPEND THE REST OF YOUR LIFE
1st Edition, Spicewood Publishing, New York, 2002
2nd Edition 2014
© Sokrates Verlag München GmbH, Germany, 2014
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the authors.
Graphic Design: Wolfgang Rollmann, München
ISBN 978-3-9812912-1-6
www.sokrates-verlag.de www.sokrates-verlag.com
INTRODUCTION
TRUE HAPPINESS IS HAVING ONE’S PASSION AS A PROFESSION
We all have to work for a living. How we spend our time earning money largely determines the quality of our lives. For those who earn a living doing the things they love, life is an exciting adventure. This book will help you make career choices you won’t regret when you reflect on your life.
The meaning of life is less important than the zest for living. Vitality and aliveness are career related. No vacation is as invigorating as the right vocation. If you organize your career around what lights you up, you will enjoy your entire life more.
While most people toil away at their obligations, a fortunate few achieve freedom by transforming their passion into a career. If they can do it, so can you. Time & Money will introduce you to the philosophy of entrepreneurship, which is an attitude of personal responsibility combined with a penchant for innovation. The entrepreneur operates a business or runs a department of a corporation as a profit center. He or she guarantees results that build the business and add to the bottom line.
Entrepreneurship is by no means exclusive to small business. We wrote this book for free agents, people who live by their own choices, whether they work alone, collaborate with other free agents, or perform a leadership role in a large corporation. Every big company is a conglomerate of units that function as small businesses. We all need to be effective and to make work meaningful.
Entrepreneurship means living one’s dream. It means achieving goals that are in tune with the heart. It’s not easy to follow your bliss when other people expect you to conform to familiar systems. In a society that glorifies compromise and mediocrity, entrepreneurship is a hard road. But there is no easy road. You can fight for what truly matters or you can fight off the boredom that comes from living without passion.
Parents and teachers charted the course for most people. We developed various roles that enabled us to fit into society and to earn a living, but something is still missing. We were not created to spend our lives constricted in a cubicle or performing repetitive tasks, and our bodies know it. Most people wear expressions of hopelessness and defeat.
It can be different. You can create a life that organizes around your self-expression. Time & Money will show you the stages of a rewarding career. It will give you the big picture of how a business grows. Starting with small projects, you’ll learn to transform your favorite activities into your own business or into a new branch for an established company. By transforming the things you most enjoy into products and services that benefit others, you can learn to achieve real financial freedom and the peace of mind that goes with it. The missing piece for most people is the design.
You wouldn’t build a house without a blueprint: the craftsmen wouldn’t know how to coordinate their work, space wouldn’t flow properly from one room to another, and every time you changed your mind, the costs would skyrocket. Yet people routinely fall into a career or lifestyle without the benefit of a suitable design. Unless you become the architect for your life, it will be over before you achieve your dreams. Here is the design manual you need to get started.
Business is a game that operates according to specific rules. Those who break the rules are doomed to failure. You must know which rules are universal and which ones change as a business matures. Knowing when to shift gears is essential to winning. Time & Money isn’t a “how-to” book. There are plenty of manuals and guidebooks, and some of them are quite useful. We have avoided the oversimplification and narrow focus that makes business books easy to read and hard to apply. Here you will learn some of what works and what doesn’t work in the process of designing and building your career as a free agent.
Time & Money demonstrates a flexible business model for people who want to live life on their own terms. It doesn’t tell you what to think. Rather it shows you how to think in alternative ways that get results under real-world conditions. You will learn to apply curiosity to discover the craft that best suits your nature and to build an organization to bring that craft to market. True success is complex and difficult. Time & Money is for intelligent, motivated individuals who see their careers as a lifelong learning game.
We have conducted over thirty thousand coaching interviews since 1980 to explore what makes people truly happy. This book is a map based on the actual experiences of our clients. The lessons we learned as career coaches enabled us to write Time & Money, which we hope will save you valuable time by helping you design a career and lifestyle that really fits your nature.
In larger terms, entrepreneurs benefit society by creating jobs. Entrepreneurial companies, large and small, have created millions of jobs for associates, free agents, vendors, employees, and temps. While corporate jobs have declined in recent decades, entrepreneurs have forged an entirely new economy by providing sevices that make life better. By finding your niche, you discover the pleasure of providing for others.
THE THEATER OF BUSINESS
Business is people. The better you understand yourself and others, the happier and more successful you will become. We all play various roles in life—mother, father, son, daughter, friend, lover, boss, employee, leader, and countless more. These roles bring meaning to our lives. They connect us to other people. But often they don’t reflect who we are. Career satisfaction comes from knowing who you are and from choosing roles that fit your talent and temperament.
When you don’t know yourself, you can’t recognize your real talents. You work hard at a life you don’t enjoy just to make ends meet. Your real ability lies dormant. Time is fleeting and money is scarce. Scarcity makes your decisions. Life seems like a struggle. You know there is a better way, but pressing duties keep you from seeing it.
We have discovered a way to help people gain a larger perspective by restoring their ability to play. According to William Shakespeare, all the world is a stage. Business is a theater in which most people are cast in roles that don’t really fit. Everyone plays in the theater of business because everyone has to produce something of value in order to survive. It is refreshing to think of your career and your lifestyle as entertainment. First, it must enliven you. Then it must delight your family and friends. Finally, a great career must amaze your associates and astound your opponents.
We have survived as a human community by evolving with complementary talents. Like ants that specialize within a colony, we each find the function that suits us best. Before you can earn a living successfully you must determine what role best suits your nature.
A successful business or project requires three basic functions that are performed by three very different types of people:
(1)Visionary—the artist who sees an innovation that can be turned into a business.
(2)Marketer—the believer who sees how to get that innovation to as many people as possible.
(3)Manager—the general who organizes the people and executes processes to get the innovation to market.
If you work for a big company, your job title probably dictates which of these roles you play. If you are upwardly mobile, the most important career adjustment you can make is to make certain that your duties fit your personality type. When your job taps your talent, you can excel.
As soon as you take on responsibility for a business or project, you will need to balance your team with people who are visionaries, marketers, and managers. Just as baseball players specialize in different positions according to their individual abilities, business people are most effective when you play them according to their strengths.
When first starting your own business or project, you may have to handle the responsibilities of all three roles alone. As your business grows, you will want to focus on what you do best and bring in specialists to fill the roles that complement your own talents. Your first challenge is, therefore, identifying the role you were meant to play.
Each of the three roles adds something to the way a business or project develops. Along the way you must become proficient in all three functions so you can work together with all the different specialists who will have an impact on your career. Each of the three represents an essential aspect of leadership. Together they are more than the sum of the parts. Synergy between these three roles creates the kind of chemistry that customers and employees can trust.
During the growth of a business or project your participation is essential. After some years the business will mature to the point where it operates with or without you. Finally you will transcend all the roles by filling them with people who are more effective than you. If you fulfill that scenario you will enjoy the freedom to work on your business rather than in your business. But that will only happen if you dedicate yourself to lifelong learning to master all the skills needed for success, and if you operate your business as a learning organization that develops leaders.
Fortunately, this kind of learning is fun. It is a practical process of discovering what works while getting to know yourself and your team better. Self-knowledge gives you the confidence and self-esteem to go forward. As your comprehension improves, you earn the right to associate with increasingly effective people and to participate in a greater variety of business cultures. Understanding people who think differently from you brings the kind of pleasure usually reserved for explorers and travelers. It brings a sense of adventure to your career.
Each of the three essential disciplines requires a different “language.” Visionaries speak in broad, general terms about what is possible. Marketers use words to create action. Managers converse to handle details and measure outcomes. Each function requires a different kind of focus. Your personality and body type probably make you more suited to one role than to the others. You’ll perform best when you select the role that you also find the most attractive.
VISIONARIES
Visionary leaders love the adventure of stepping into and navigating uncharted terrain. These people thrive on the chaos that goes hand-in-hand with start-ups. Every business starts with a vision. Behind the logo of every familiar company name is an inspired individual who made that vision a reality by treading boldly into unknown territory.
A visionary leader is also curious about what people want and how to get it for them. Business visionaries see patterns in the marketplace before other people do. Their minds are filled with theoretical constructs or mathematical formulas. Their ideas, however, are clear and workable. These folks live in the future.
There are plenty of starry eyed believers who fantasize about great achievements. Visionaries are different. They roll up their sleeves and make it happen. A seemingly mighty force of nature, they sweep others along with their personal force.
What is the force that drives visionary people? According to author Gary Hoover, “It all begins with curiosity.” Gary attributes the great businesses of the twentieth century to visionaries like Sam Walton, Herb Kelleher, and Michael Dell, whose curiosity opened doors that others didn’t even see. These visionary leaders marched to the beat of their own drummers, throwing off caution and advice from others who thought their visions were impossible.
Curiosity is the source of innovation, and innovation is the engine that powers entrepreneurship. Innovative visionaries get the ball rolling. They are the people who ask, “Why not?” They pioneer new things and new ways of doing things. They are not averse to risk. They have the toughest of the three functions because they challenge the status quo.
Inventors, futurists, designers, artists, and actors all fall into this category. Steve Jobs is the consummate visionary. His Apple Computer made computing power accessible to every man, woman, and child. Like Jobs, visionaries see what is possible—not what is impossible. They turn those possibilities into probabilities. Alone, they generally flounder. But with a marketer selling their ideas, they can touch many people with their creativity. And when a manager lends support to their dreams, their ideas take root.
A reporter who interviewed car-maker Henry Ford at the pinnacle of his success later commented that Ford seemed too idealistic to be believed. He had to keep reminding himself of Ford’s tangible accomplishments to keep from dismissing the man as unstable. Creative types often come across as unrealistic to people who consider themselves as having both feet planted firmly on the ground.
Most entrepreneurial businesses are started by visionaries and grown by marketers. Together, they can conquer the world. An upbeat duo, one dreams and the other believes those dreams into existence. Once the company achieves solid earnings, it can bring a manager on board.
Combining a visionary with a manager to start up a business is perilous. One is from Mars, and the other from Pluto. They are always interfering with each other’s function. Visionaries are important during every phase of a business to keep the company on course. But they are especially important in the early design stages. When managers create the vision for a business, they build tragically boring systems. In a fully functioning business team, the marketer is often the translator between the visionary and the manager.
Imagination and artistic flair provide the inspiration that gives birth to a business. Visionaries have those qualities by nature. On the other hand, when visionaries try to manage large projects, their inconsistency leads everyone astray. These folks can leap from one position to another effortlessly. They thrive on paradox, and seem to have a special ability to create order out of chaos. Life is art for these dreamers, and consistency seems to them like the product of mediocre minds.
Most visionaries are driven by the dream of a wonderful world. They want to make the current world better and they truly believe they can. Some people think they’re crazy. The newspapers of the steamboat’s day dubbed the invention Fulton’s Folly. The masses denounced the first sewing machines, calling them an abomination to God. It takes unusual courage to follow one’s vision in the face of this kind of resistance.
You can’t blame entrenched interests and huddled masses for fighting change. Vision is a kind of creative destruction. Visionaries create disruption; they displace familiar patterns to usher in new realities, and they seem genuinely befuddled when culture resists their ideas.
When a visionary entrepreneur is thwarted, he gets lost in his dreams. He sees other people as obstacles to obvious opportunities and he forces his ideas on them with bullying and begging. To keep the dream alive, he makes lavish promises.
Of the three types of people, visionaries are the most likely to end their careers with nothing. They fall in love with their own ideas and, like the legendary Narcissus, spend their lives enraptured with their own reflections. Visionaries can be so idealistic that they discourage marketers and managers from working with them. Their stubborn self-right-eousness causes them to cling to beautiful possibilities in lieu of accepting practical realities.
MARKETERS
Marketer types are recognizable by their gregarious natures and by the pleasure they take in inviting other people to participate in their interests and projects. These are friendly people who are outgoing and deeply interested in other people. Charming and witty, these folks love people, and it shows in their natural warmth and friendliness. They are magnetic. Marketers are born to network. When they believe in a product, they also have a knack for selling it.
Unfortunately, the image of salespeople that carried over from the last century is terrible. Hard selling came into fashion after World War II because managers were put in charge of marketers. By demanding “numbers” at all costs, managers pressured marketers into pressuring customers. Today, as business evolves into a more balanced game, marketers are earning equal authority. As they return to their true natures, they are bringing about a whole new kind of sales and marketing based on educating people.
Marketers are the doers. While visionaries dream about what attracts customers, marketers pick up the phone. While managers prepare for the problems of dealing with a lot of people, marketers bring those people in. These individuals act first and think later.
Marketers are more than salespeople. In addition to selling the company’s image to the customers, they also sell it to the team. Their inspiration keeps everyone inspired and working. Their firm belief in others creates the mighty engine that powers a business. The marketer transforms ideas into action.
Modern marketing is the craft of discerning what people want and then helping them to obtain it. In an entrepreneurial organization, everyone sells. But marketing types bring special ability to the task. Their love of people gives them a natural affinity for service. When the marketing department is staffed by people who have a talent for service, it is a happy place, abuzz with excitement.
Sometimes visionaries and organizers get drafted into sales and marketing positions. They are taught the skill and may use it well, but they never glow with the task. They don’t light up at the sight of a telephone. Marketers, on the other hand, live and die by the phone. They are also the masters of e-mailing, faxing, sending post cards, and even an occasional letter in a bottle. They just want to reach out and sell someone. Connecting and connections are the center of their universe.
Marketers are born communicators. They have a gift for moving people. Marketers are upbeat. Their energy and positive attitude inspires others to enroll in their projects. They want to help people fulfill their desires, and they are willing to force the issue. Yet, the natural sensitivity of marketers lets them know intuitively when to pressure people and when to allow them some room. With their honest enthusiasm and belief in people, they easily resolve conflicts that put the rest of us in gridlock.
Marketers are people of action. They don’t get bogged down in the details that are best left to managers. Unlike visionaries, marketers don’t need to understand the underlying theory or implications of a product. It either works or it doesn’t. You want it or you don’t. Their direct approach is refreshing, and it gets things done.
Even the finest people have weakness, and marketers are no exception. These delightful, generous folks often see so many great things to sell that they fail to become loyal to one product or system. Many marketers reach the end of their career to discover that a great fortune has passed them by while they were hopping from one project to another. Despite this slight handicap, marketers are the most likely to have a successful career, and when they lead organizations, those companies usually achieve outstanding results.
MANAGERS
It takes a certain kind of personality to properly organize a project or put together a new business. Completing such a complex endeavor requires tedious attention to detail combined with an unusually high degree of courage. The managerial role demands a tough individual who thrives on enforcing the rules and procedures. Management means manipulation, and few people have the stomach for it.
Every business needs a champion, a fighter who does the dirty work. Managers are the kind of people who thrive on battles and their details. They are rare birds in the game of business, pragmatic organizers who see present events in light of the past. While the visionary needs control, the manager needs order, and where the marketer sees opportunities, the manager sees problems.
Bill Gates is the ultimate organizer. His genius stems from his willingness and ability to fight for his system. His courage and strategic brilliance enable him to face challenges from even the mightiest opponents.
The best managers know how to delegate and build teams to carry out their mandates. They are tough-minded people who thrive on bringing out the best in teams and individuals. Military generals are managers. They don’t decide to make war; they carry out the details. Colin Powell will do whatever he can to avoid battle, but once it becomes inevitable, he will lead with brilliance and courage. Generals don’t mind offending people, and they are able to make sacrifices that others could never face. Managers have that same quality of expediency. All true managers are realists who recognize and accept that a few may have to pay the price for the good of the many.
Logistics are the domain of managers. Every business is limited by its ability to create, store, transport and deliver goods and services. Managers are the people who tend to all of the systems that must cooperate to get the goods to the market.
Managers organize. Organization relates to the rules and procedures that define the game of business. In general, people with organizing personalities are drawn to careers as accountants, lawyers and supervisors, but they are also scattered throughout a wide variety of other rule-oriented careers. In an entrepreneurial business the manager builds the systems that enable the company to grow.
If a manager decides to start up a new business, he must assemble a team in advance that includes a visionary and a marketer. But few managers are so adventuresome. Most prefer to join an established organization. Franchises are tailor-made for managers. Here the meticulous organizer can buy into a system that doesn’t require, or even allow, variation from a fixed formula. The rules are clear. The systems are proven. A conscientious person only need stick with the manual and enforce the rules without exception.
Good management gives a business the kind of aggressive stance that enables it to survive in the marketplace. It pounces on details that would interfere with growth. Murphy’s Law prevails in business. Anything that can go wrong certainly will. Always make sure the manager checks out every detail before you let the marketers show a new product or service to your customers. Managers are there to clean up the messes made by the visionaries and marketers.
When managers fail, it is because they become too rigid and dogmatic. When rules matter more than people, workers rise up against leadership. When organizers engender resentment by putting procedures and profits above humanity, they invite a backlash from within their own system.
