There’s a lot of B-S talked in self-development circles about “faking it until you make it”.  The theory goes that you have to pretend you are already successful, and then you will become successful.  So we end up with legions of back-bedroom entrepreneurs all going on as if the virtual office in the prestige building really is where they and their cohort of “associates” beaver away at servicing their myriad big-name clients.  Not that anyone’s fooled, of course.  Except perhaps other silly fakers.

You see, there’s a problem with “fake it til you make it”: it’s that word – Fake.

People really aren’t that unconscious any more.  As the consciousness revolution progresses, and more and more people learn to trust their intuition, it  is becoming increasingly dangerous to pretend that you’re something you’re not.   People are naturally repelled from what they sense is false – and attracted to what they feel is authentic.

There is another reason why faking it can hold you back.  Many people start to believe their own bullshit, to believe they really are already successful.  There are two problems with that: firstly they unconsciously stop trying so hard – after all, their unconscious mind reasons, if we’re successful,  why are we working so hard?  Secondly, and more damaging,  they stop asking for help – in fact they actively repel it, resisting all and any suggestion of where they might be going wrong.  After all, successful people don’t need help, do they?

OK then, so should you be running about telling everyone it’s all going to hell in a hand-basket, that the kids are going shoeless and the wife’s taking in washing?  Well, probably not – not unless you want the odd ‘charity’ gig at half your usual rate.  But what you can do is drop all the pretence, all the self-conscious references to “we” all over your “corporate” website, all the lavish spending (of the housekeeping money, probably) at the networking bar.  And just tell people what you do well, and for whom.

You don’t need plush offices, fancy stationery or a retinue of minions to convince people you know your stuff – if you actually do know your stuff, that is.  And if you don’t, stop pretending you do – even if by some random stroke of luck you do manage to land some work, you’ll probably cock it up if you’ve oversold yourself.

When you can talk about your subject with knowledge, authority and integrity, people will start to warm to you.  When your focus is on them and on delivering real value to everyone who engages you, people will start to hire you.  And when you are producing genuine results from your unique brilliance, people will start to advocate you.

And you will never again need to fake it.

So off we went this morning, all the course materials and refreshments packed neatly into the boot.  As we completed the 2hr drive, I started wondering whether my phone battery was going to last 4 hours use as a hotspot.  And then it hit me: my laptop bag was still sitting on the side in my office – I’d forgotten to put the flippin’ thing in the car!

And you know what?  A few hours of quiet time (well, apart from the gabble from downstairs during the breaks) has worked wonders for my focus and clarity.  Freed from the “what I’ve done so far” energy locked up in my laptop, and working on the back of a couple of folded A4 flyers, a rough manual mind-map and a lot of free thinking later, and I think I’ve identified where the business has been a bit stuck recently.

It’s a subtle shift, and one I probably wouldn’t have seen if I’d had my existing body of work and my current positioning statements to hand.  But it’s a very important shift.

Something I’ve struggled with for quite a while now (as my friends and mentors will all attest) is blending my Busy Fool, Loving Work, Opportunity Matrix and Core Process work in a way that will make sense for larger, even corporate, clients.  With my mind’s freedom to roam outside of the artificial constraints I had placed on the concepts, I think I now have it.

More on that later, once I’ve written it out fully from that back-of -an-envelope mind-map.

The point of this blog is the value of taking yourself away from your usual environment, and liberating yourself from your existing materials and locked-in thinking.  You don’t want to be reinventing the wheel every day – that way lies sheer Busy Foolishness.  But starting from scratch every now and then, and seeing if you end up in the same place, is a great way to check you’re on the right path.  I wasn’t, not quite, and this small but, I think, very significant shift in my thinking should open up a new, easier, more effective path on my course to fulfillment.

And, with a little luck, more and better-paying clients.

This video explains it better than any words could:

• Economy – doing things as cheaply as possible, avoiding spending more than is necessary

• Efficiency – doing things as smoothly as possible, eliminating processes and activities that do not lead closer to the finished product.

• Effectiveness – doing things as well as possible, making sure that the end result is a close match to what the customer actually wants.

Excessive economy can cause problems in production/delivery, as components fail more frequently, thus reducing efficiency.  Or producing a product that is just too low quality for what customers want.  Too much focus on efficiency can leave a company paying over the odds for the best parts or services.  Or removing processes that customers actually value, leaving them less satisfied.  And if the attention is exclusively on effectiveness, then costs can quickly get out of control and activities that don’t add real value will creep in.

Economy plus efficiency tends to create a low-cost strategy, where the cost of sale is driven low to allow competition on price alone.  Economy plus effectiveness will drive a budget strategy – with customers getting most of what they want at a price that seems very good value.  And efficiency plus effectiveness will tend towards a premium strategy, giving the customer a smooth delivery of what they want, but at a price.

You will often hear these three E’s  described as a kind of hierarchy, with Effectiveness being at the top of the tree.  However, they each have a part to play in building a successful business, and it is the combination of all three that brings the final E … Excellence itself.

… highly entrepreneurial, talented, effective top coder?

So, we hear today that “Bob” has been outsourcing his work to a Chinese firm for just 1/5 of his salary, keeping the other 80% for himself, and spending most of his own time diddling about on the web.  Leave aside for a minute that he was working on a national infrastructure project, and that he clearly broke his employers’ trust, and their security policies, maybe we should be asking ourselves what, exactly, we employ people for?

Essentially, the only reason ever to employ someone is because there is an outcome that we need.  That might be something like “happy customers”, “boxes of widgets ready to ship”, “records kept accurately and up to date” or (as in Bob’s case) “clean, well-written code delivered on time”.  That begs the question, do we employ people to actually do the work, or do we employ them to get the work done?  Bob certainly got the work done – he was considered the company’s best coder.  But in most companies right now, it seems to be that we actually contract for a certain number of the employee’s hours, and then negotiate about what outcome they will produce from them.

What if we looked at it a different way?  If our objective in employing someone is to get something done, might it not be more effective – and a whole lot more enjoyable all round – if we started to contract for the outcome, and negotiate on the quantity of hours required to produce it?

But it’s worse than that.  One of my mentors has a great routine he plays with those who are a little bit prissy about selling themselves.  It goes something like this:

“Your service really helps people doesn’t it?”

“Yes, of course!”

“And your unique knowledge, skills and experience … they make you the very best solution for your perfect customers, don’t they?”

“Well, yes!”

“And without what you can do for them, they’re going to keep on suffering from what’s holding them back, correct?”

“Yes, that’s right.” (notice the 3 x yes there?)

“And there are, what, a couple of hundred people who you could help … maybe several thousand?”

“Oh, at least that!”

“But there’s a little problem about that, isn’t there?”

“Oh? What’s that then?”

“Well, they don’t know anything about you, do they?  Your perfect clients, I mean.”

“Er … well, no … not really”

“Because you don’t like to be too salesy, do you?  After all, no-one likes a salesperson do they?”

“No, they don’t!”

“Even when what that person is offering would be really useful for them …?”

“Er …”

“Maybe even solve a problem they’ve been struggling with forever?  Help them spend more time with their family, buy their kids nice Christmas presents, take the spouse on a nice holiday …?”

“Well, I hadn’t really thought about it that way.”

“No, because selling is too common for you, isn’t it, you’re a professional, you’re above all that!  All that offering someone the help they need … letting them know about something that might even completely change their life”

“Well, no … I mean yes … er …”

And then he goes for the jugular:

“Bit of a shit, really, aren’t you!”

~~~~~~~~~~ ¦¦¦ ~~~~~~~~~~

Surprisingly effective as a piece of “in your face” coaching!  I know it changed my view of selling, stopped me being quite so prissy about offering people my Focus programmes, and even about asking people for money so I can help even more people.  It shifts the focus, from “how do I sell my stuff to people who might possibly buy it” to “how do I share my stuff with the people who really need it (and so will probably ask to buy it)”.  Instead of a sales call being an imposition, it becomes something they are eager to hear about, and I am eager to share.

I developed a little acronym for those experts who are great at what they do, but stay broke by hiding their brilliance for fear of offending:

Sales Hating Impoverished Talent

So, if sales reluctance is your problem, what could you be doing to become a bit less of a S.H.I.T?

OK – so that’s about as far from empiricism as you can get, I know you’re wondering how on earth I’m going to turn that load of woo into something real-world!

Actually, it’s quite easy.  I’m not going to get into all sorts of quantum stuff about trees in forests or cats in boxes.  Take a look at this blog, and this one  (and this video) and you’ll start to get a feel for how your imagination can change your world.  Or at least your focus can change how you interact with your world, and how it interacts with you.

In the blog about attitude, I showed how an expectation of bad (pessimism) generated a bad outcome, and non-attachment and hope for a positive result brought about a good outcome.

And in the one about graffiti, you can see that your feelings and impressions of the world are clearly altered by how you choose to focus on it.

So, if you get to choose what your world is like by how you choose to focus on it, and if the way your world reacts to you can be improved by how you choose to focus on it, doesn’t it make good business sense to choose to expect the best of  situations you encounter, and those you deal with?

How this relates to the real world and to business is that many of the great brands take great pains to make their customers feel that they belong to a community.  Some do this formally, with user groups and clubs, both on and offline.  Car makers are a good example of this, with their drivers clubs.  And others – Apple would be an example – connect their users with an over-arching identity, the sort of person who uses their product.

The best communities, those with the highest engagement, have an ethos of mutual support, both amongst the membership and between the members and the brand (or management).  It’s never a purely commercial arrangement – that goes back to His Holiness’ idea of voluntary contribution. And they stretch far beyond the initial product, becoming an integral part of their members’ world – just like a family.

It might seem odd to talk about voluntary work in the context of applying woo to business, but actually some of the most successful business promotions are based around giving something for free. And some of the best customer loyalty programmes use unexpected free upgrades and gifts – airlines and hotels do this very well, but so do online retailers like Zapos, who regularly upgrade users to priority delivery, and grocers like Tesco giving extra loyalty points or money off vouchers (as a bonus, not a point-of-sale incentive).

As an aside, there have been some interesting discussions on the Ecademy social network lately about how communities thrive and develop – you might want to pop over and contribute.

People raising their kids well, showing kindness, and generally looking after each other is – fortunately – not unusual, so we don’t report on it.  It’s just not remarkable.  But wouldn’t it be a nice world if we did get reminded of all the good stuff going on?

In business, we can sometimes be a bit like those reporters – highlighting the one supplier cock-up, not the dozens of perfect deliveries; noting the single late arrival, not the weeks on end of late finishes; the one failed product, not the whole range of brilliant successes.  And just maybe we do need to remember that those are the exceptions, and to celebrate the success that is normality.

The Dalai Lama’s view is that we should do all we can to keep someone alive, even if the only life function left is the breathing, when to do so is the wishes of their loved ones, and the family is well-off enough that paying for the care is not a great financial burden.

On the other hand, he says, when there is clearly no hope of recovery, it doesn’t serve anyone – especially the person themselves – to impoverish the family in artificially prolonging a life that is effectively over.  In that case, it is time to say goodbye.

I think such decisions are probably easier when your traditions or beliefs mean there is something after this life, and this is just a stage on our spirit’s journey.

Maybe business isn’t that much different.  Where the owners – maybe a parent company – can afford it, there is some argument for keeping a business going even after it’s viable lifespan, for the benefit of staff, suppliers and other stakeholders.  And also for allowing it to end when it is beyond recovery and draining the owner’s limited reserves.

And that’s an easier decision if you believe the end of this particular business isn’t the end of your adventure.