Sunday, September 12, 2010

Time is Money! - Heading towards the right race?

by wouterduijndam
It's all about the right speed for the appropriate context - often going slow in the pre-race results in winning the race!

Haven't you heard "time is money!" by your boss or the executive board meeting, when there had been a proposal to improve operations or certain business processes?

Often from the manager's perspective this is meant in the sense, of not "wasting" money through conversations or dialogue dealing with the problem at hand.

How have you learned best in the past to deal with obstacles or constraints in your life? Certainly mostly without time pressure. We took the paths of learning that fitted our personal experience and accumulated knowledge. To do that we needed TIME. 

Where and in which context could a manager allow himself to let the use of a bit of extra time (within the set time frame available) to find better solutions for pressing problems today?

Best area will be a process within the organization that is most troubling but rather not having relevant direct impact on the organization's outcome. Do the small experiment with an outreaching impact on the wealth of the organization.

Let an outsider, or by-stander have a deeper look at your business (at best a customer will be also involved) to advice you. Done in a lean thinking way, doing an insightful deep 2-hours conversation could already be really helpful to open up opportunity alleys of the future.

What do you think, would that be worth for your organization?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi Ralf, I agree Time is the most important resource. Seneca wrote a diatribe on the shortness of life that might be of interest to your followers. Tim Ferriss posted a nice blog on this at http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/blog/2009/04/24/on-the-shortness-of-life-an-introduction-to-seneca/

Offering problem solving to companies is good, and seems to be a common approach.

Soon, I will experiment with applying Appreciative Inquiry (AI) principles when creating a future state.

Instead of looking at the organization as a problem for us to solve, AI leads us into an organization's core positive strengths that we can build a better future on. Dare we dream?

For more information on AI please refer to the work of David L. Cooperrider.

RalfLippold said...

Hi Bob,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Focusing on people's strengths (also on organizations' ones) will enable the true opportunities of the future :-)

Cheers, Ralf