Human beings evolved from lightly-furred prey to Earth's dominant species.
How did that happen?
Certainly, 2 things played a large role: brawn and brains. When I say 'brawn' I mean muscular strength. When I say 'brains' I mean intellectual strength, including cognitive intelligence and emotional intelligence.
Brawn and brains helped us, over time, crawl out of caves with clubs in hand and build office cubicles with smart phones in hand. Human beings had the muscular strength to survive on the available land and travel to better lands in search of safer homes and more-abundance and richer food sources. Of even more importance, human beings learned:
- how to understand one another,
- how to associate with one another,
- how to cooperate with one another,
- how to think strategically,
- how to work together in teams.
Which brings us to business...
Your business will be at its best when each of your people uses his or her individual business-brawn and individual business-brain.
Individual Business-Brawn
One hundred years ago, over 90% of the people in Canada earned money by exchanging physical effort for money. They used their bodies to do farm work, construction work, heavy industrial work, etc. Now, in business, muscular strength has been replaced by individual strengths where:
Individual Strength = Talent + pertinent business Knowledge + Skill, developed through repeated practice of work-thought and work-action
Each person has unique talents and some of those talents align with working in business. The key is to find those business-fitting talents and put them to use at work, gain knowledge about work and about the talents to learn how to best mesh the two, and practice, test, measure, practice...practice, practice.
Individual Business-Brain
Every person's brain is wired differently. That applies to learning, remembering, to understanding other people, to communicating with other people, and to getting along with other people... and to a whole lot more. In business, we cannot come even close to covering the enormous and unfathomable range of individual-brain nuances.
Nor do we need to.
A huge step is to believe every person's brain is unique and that uniqueness is both the source of species greatness and the source of interpersonal misunderstandings and conflict. The biggest mistakes a business person can make fall in the following areas:
- assuming people think alike,
- assuming people possess similar business desires,
- assuming people communicate the same way,
- assuming people remember the same facts [i.e., never facts, just perceptions],
- etc.
If you want your business to be strong and smart you must work continuously to address and improve in these areas.