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Posted August 26, 2009
Superheroes in the workplace - Keep your eyes open, and you will find them.
Last Friday I was out, as was most of the rest of the office. Only one designer and our office manager were manning the ramparts, as the battle to survive and thrive raged on all around. By the rockets read glare, the bombs bursting in air, and all that . . . business is war - don’t forget that. An urgent client request comes in that morning, following a great meeting earlier in the week. The client loved two of our toys, wanted samples of both shipped to them, and needed one of them ASAP for a late 2010 opportunity. YESSSSS! Good things happen to those who do something. Wish I knew what it was. A quick assessment was done, and one prototype was pronounced non-functional, and the other was out with a client and unavailable. Egads! What to do? Miss a great, miraculous, save-the-company opportunity because the designer of the products was out on vacation? Miss the opportunity to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat? As my mother would say, "For want of a nail, the horse was lost, for want of a horse the battle was lost." It is just such a situation as this that can be traced backwards as the cause of the failure of many an enterprise, I promise you. One small opportunity missed, one error left uncorrected, one O-ring problem on a booster engine resulting in catastrophic failure. Luckily, “Performance rises to meet demand.” (one of my favorite quotes from German professor Herr Novak). Heroes are made and not born. They are all around us, performing small acts of every day heroism. Maybe you are cut from the same inestimable cloth?
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