Everyone makes mistakes. All the time. The difference in an organization is that those whose mistakes have huge impact are usually in a position to hide them. Everyone else below them is transparent and subject to being censured.
Most businesses start the morning the same way: people get in, grab a cup of coffee and get on with their day’s work, which varies with each business.
We always find it easy to address the things we see. The external factors. Clothes. Speech patterns. Quirks. Qualifications.
In business there are always moans about what isn’t there. The quality of leadership. The commitment of staff. Organization. Experience. Resources. Budgets. Manpower. The market.
We are gifted with brains that have helped us survive through the eat-or-be-eaten millennia that has led us to here. This moment in history when technology has made cooperation the virtue we must most assiduously cultivate.
A business is made up of parts. Human resources, infrastructure, data. Each is a little like a Lego brick. On its own it may not appear like much, but together they make an edifice that makes total sense.
“In an age where there is much talk about “being yourself” I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. Rather it seems to me that when one is too intent on “being himself” he runs the risk of impersonating a shadow.”
We communicate using words. But words are imprecise allowing a lot to be inferred and creating, in themselves, a gap between describing things as they seem and things as they are.
Back in 1973 a John Hopkins sociologist by the name of Mark Granovetter studied the dynamics of networks in the hope of finding the bridging points between macro-level predictions (made by social theory) and micro-level interactions that seemed to somehow affect everything.
Attention is more than courtesy. It is a conscious decision to allocate cognitive resources. The things we pay attention to are the ones that are key to what we do. They become priority in our day. They demand the most resources to monitor and maintain.