Taking it Forward

British business guru Sir John Harvey Jones – ‘The Troubleshooter’ once said to my mentor Peter Thomson: “Peter, only ever do what only you can do”. This sounds simple but there’s a little more to it than that in terms of your journey of transformation. There are some things others may be able to do better than us, or quicker than us, but often part of the learning and transformation process is for you and me to do these things ourselves rather than offload or outsource them to someone else.

I spent 20 years working with Warwick Business School, one of the top schools in the world, tutoring students through the MBA (Master of Business Administration) degree course. Students who came from a lower level degree course or from experience in industry learned about all the functions of ‘business’ – finance, marketing, IT, HR, organisational behaviour, operations, economics and compliance. Not to be able to ‘do’ all these things themselves but to be able to select and manage the people who were doing them. A CEO doesn’t need to be an accountant, economist, engineer, marketer but needs to know what they do and have a good understanding of how they should be doing it.

In the same way, you and I, as our own ‘CEO’ need to know and understand al the things we need to get done around us. We do a lot of things other people could do for us but if our dream is to ‘build a new house’ it’s not us who are going to be doing the construction, installing the plumbing, putting in the electrics, doing the decorating or getting the planning permission in the first place. We may do some of it if our skills are a ‘fit’ but mostly we’ll contract others to do these things.

Part of our vision of the ‘future’ is what we will ourselves be ‘doing and ‘doing is one of the four domains of life. It’s not the same as ‘getting things done’. That comes in the ‘others’ and ‘lifestyle’ domains.

There are two things to consider here: what do we want to do and what do we need to do to become what we seek to be. What we do is strongly influenced by the ‘self’ domain which points to some of the things we need to do and which only we can do. Things like exercise and meditation – no-one else can do these for us and it doesn’t matter if we don’t want or don’t feel like doing these things they still need to be done or we won’t achieve our goals, including those which have nothing to do, seemingly, with maintaining our bodies and our minds.

The ‘doing’ or ‘vocation’ domain of life is primarily about what we want to do and what we enjoy doing. Part of what we need to do is interact with others and sometimes we might not feel like it, but we still need to do it and there are some interactions others cannot perform on our behalf. One of the key things we need to do, again which no-one else can do for us, is learning and of course we may also want to do this.