On the path to achieving any business or personal goal, there will be roadblocks and obstacles. Some will be clear and obvious, and others will be invisible and unexpected. Some obstacles will be what Donald Rumsfeld called “the unknown unknowns.”
We discussed the idea of “pressing problems” in earlier chapters. One of the primary uses of creativity is to identify all the factors that are holding you back from achieving your most important goals and objectives. You must then go through these issues to determine your biggest obstacle, the removal of which can help you achieve your goals faster than the removal of any other obstacle.
Imagine yourself with a group of people, walking along a mountain road. You come around a turn and there before you is a huge rock that has fallen and is now blocking your passage. In this metaphor, the purpose of an organization is to bring together the different talents and skills necessary to remove this “rock in the road” that is stopping you from making any further progress.
A group of my business associates in Los Angeles put together a high-tech company offering a valuable service to publicly traded companies. They continually upgraded the product, and the customers who used it reported excellent results. The problem was that they did not have enough business to break even, much less to make a profit. They were continually raising new funds from prospective investors just to stay alive. This situation continued for several years.
Then they had a great revelation, one that is not uncommon to start-ups in high-tech industries. They realized that their problem was not the need to continually improve their technology but to sell their technology to more customers. Because they came from technical backgrounds, it had never occurred to them that the product or service is secondary to the ability to sell it in sufficient quantities to make a profit.
Focus on Sales
With this revelation, they turned their attention to finding an outstanding sales professional, someone who is called an “outperformer,” who could drive the sales of their product to a larger market. Once they were clear about the solution they needed, they very soon found the right person with the right set of sales skills.
Within one year, with the sales executive working aggressively fifty hours a week, the company went from losses to profits. In the second year, profits doubled and then tripled. In the third year, profits went up ten times over anything that the company had ever imagined in the past. The stock price jumped ten times as well, and all the financial problems that had accumulated over the years were quickly resolved.
What is your “rock”? What is the number one obstacle that is holding you back from achieving the personal or financial results you desire? Whatever it is, you must be absolutely clear about your biggest problem, and then you must somehow get around, over, or through this major rock in order to achieve your most important goal.
Identifying your major rock and focusing all your mental energies on blasting that obstacle out of the way will help you to make more progress in a short time than if you were to remove all the other small obstacles in your way.
The Cluster Problem
In business, the obstacle or obstacles that are holding you back often appear as a complicated or “cluster problem.” This is a problem that has many little factors, all of which are conspiring together to hold you back from making the kind of progress you want.
However, within a complex, cluster-like problem, there always seems to be one major problem that must be solved before all the minor problems can be solved. Once the major problem is resolved or removed, all the smaller problems seem to take care of themselves quite quickly.
The biggest mistake that people make is that they prefer to do what is fun and easy rather than what is right, necessary, and difficult. They like to toy around with all the little obstacles and day-to-day problems. They distract themselves and ignore the massive rock or limiting factor that is the primary obstacle holding them back.
ACTION EXERCISES
1. Identify the biggest single obstacle, inside or outside your business, that is limiting your sales and profitability today.
2. Become comfortable saying these magic words: “I was wrong. I made a mistake. I changed my mind.”