I left you last time with a message: learn, lean into curves and twist your wrist to add gas while you burn through business and career curves.
Good or bad, the lessons you learn in taking calculated risks are worth the experience. It will build your confidence in your decision-making, minimize second-guessing and move you forward. Move forward with greater momentum; don’t retreat to a lesser, safer speed forward in your career.
The really crazy trick for career and life success?
Embrace change and the unknown with enthusiasm. You can’t cross a river with one foot planted firmly on the shore. You must put fear in the backseat and take that crucial next step, even when it is on a moss-covered rock.
Your vision, like when riding a motorcycle, must be firmly fixed as far ahead as possible. Do you have a short-term or long-term vision for your career? Long-term will keep your “feet dry” (safety) and short-term “feet wet” (highway to the danger zone).
We also left off cruising the beautiful, hilly, curvy road to business, career and life success.
What’s Around the Next Corner?
While motorcycles and running a couple of businesses make me launch out of bed (well, I may have stumbled out of bed now and then), it’s the real joy of possibilities and opportunities that await all of us in this great country to pursue life, liberty and pursuit of happiness!
What makes the day special?
Gratitude for the many blessings bestowed upon me by the powers above, our treasured clients and opportunities to keep learning and growing if I keep an open mind and positive attitude.
Emerging security technologies that deliver measurable business value, protect people and save lives keep me in this game.
If You Fall Off Your Bike …
The old saying when riding a dirt bike is, “if you don’t fall off occasionally, you aren’t going fast enough!” Taking a spill in business is normal. The key to recovery and growth is to learn from it.
I can’t tell you how many clients we have had over the last 30 years who made a decision that didn’t work out and then they formed the opinion that “we will never try that technology again; we lost money on it!”
You simply paid the tuition for an education. Don’t waste it. Analyze what happened, discuss it, examine why you failed, correct your process and move fearlessly, not fretfully, forward! An example may help.
A young sales executive building his career at IBM made a horrible error in judgment costing IBM more than $1 million. Embarrassed, he wrote a resignation letter and marched into IBM CEO Thomas Watson’s office to deliver it, fully expecting to be fired for his mistake.
After reading the letter Mr. Watson looked up and famously says, “Fire you? I just spent $600,000 training you!”
Lessons learned pave the way for your growth. Embrace opportunities that are out of your comfort zone, especially emerging security solutions that have the right qualifications to seriously consider taking a calculated risk of investing your sales time.
Assessing Your Business Resilience
Evaluating, judging and writing about viable security technologies has been a passion of mine for more than 30 years. Here are a few of my evaluation-making rules:
- Is it conceptual hardware/vaporware (alpha phase concept) or field-proven (beyond beta phase) with a variety of different installations?
- Interview end-user customers to evaluate their experiences, both pros and cons.
- Discover the security business value of the solution and can it be measured? Executives buy business results, not technology.
- What is the cost-benefit ratio from both a supplier and end-user perspective?
- Does the solution affect one or many different end-user stakeholders? The more departments that have a small win, the more cheerleaders when it’s consensus decision time.
- Can this solution be scaled and phased while still delivering security and business value?
- Is it simple or complex to market, sell, install, service and, most importantly, use by the average customer?
Business resilience depends on innovative technology solutions that work well out of the box. I will leave you with a quote that sums up my experiences and philosophy of developing, deploying and evaluating emerging technologies.
