I had a very pleasant lunch yesterday with a colleague that I worked with a few years ago and it got me thinking that opportunities are there but you have to invest to find them.
Lunch was good – the food was very nice and the conversation interesting as always. It was very much the same as the last time we met for lunch just before Christmas and the time we met for a coffee just after lockdown finished but yesterday was different. We always hoped that the opportunity would present itself for us to work together again but the right project just hadn’t come along. Yesterday over lunch we discovered a great fit between two things we are currently working on and this presents a great opportunity for both of us.
The point I am making is that if we had both said that we were too busy and could not afford the time, or we had worked for short sighted organisations that strapped us to our desks and did not allow any thinking time, we would never have known about our mutual projects or at least not until it was too late to do anything about them. The investment we made was not money (lunch was quite cheap) but the most valuable resource of all – time.
You could easily argue that previous lunches with him and others were a waste of valuable earning time and therefore not efficient. They are, however, an investment in future opportunities and therefore ,whilst not efficient, if done right they are effective. This is true of meetings, discussions, research and development, training and other speculative projects, but if done correctly they will produce a positive future.
Opportunities are out there for all of us and for our organisations but if we don’t identify the value in investing in seeking them out others will, to our cost.
The hive works on a similar principle. Some of the most valuable workers are appointed as scout bees. They could just work with the others bringing in the goods and adding to the short term bottom line but bees are cleverer than that. These bees monitor the existing opportunities, seek out new ones and communicate them to the rest of the hive. The opportunity cost of short term gain versus future opportunities is recognised to the full and the bees capitalise on it.
Maybe we should remember to do the same.
If you want to look at this further we have both manufacturing and service simulations to enable everyone to be more effective. Please contact us for details – https://www.wellsassoc.co.uk/contact/.
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