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| Personal Note: Giving Your All |
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| Written by Bob Burg and John David Mann |
| Saturday, 31 January 2009 23:00 |
 {mosimage} The current economic crisis has prompted a good deal of soul-searching, and, as painful as that can be, it is also fertile ground for new insight. In fact, we believe the current crisis offers a valuable opportunity to re-examine the nature of value—how it is created and where it comes from. Giving more than you get The nature of value is the guiding theme in our book, The Go-Giver, which follows fictional hero Joe as he goes looking for some big-gun power to help close a tough deal in a down quarter. Clout and leverage is what Joe thinks he is after; instead, he finds a system of five interlocking principles (the Five Laws of Stratospheric Success) that end up making Joe’s world his oyster. For purposes of this article, we’ll focus on the first of these principles, the Law of Value, which serves as the root and reference point of the other four: your true worth is determined by how much more you give in value than you take in payment. This law seems counterintuitive at first, even paradoxical. Adding more in value than one takes in payment—wouldn’t that be a recipe for negative cash flow and ultimate extinction? In fact, it is quite the opposite: when you adopt this law as your guiding principle, you will not only survive but thrive. In the book, a character explains this principle to Joe by examining the distinction between three restaurants. The bad restaurant tries to give just enough food and service, both in quantity and quality, to justify the money it takes from the customer. The good restaurant strives to give the most quantity and quality for the money it takes. The great restaurant strives to defy imagination. Its goal is to provide a higher quality of food and service than any amount of money could possibly pay for. The first restaurant may or may not survive, and the same goes for the second—but the third will thrive. Value is the central question at the core of every bursting bubble, from junk bonds and dot-coms of past decades to the sub-prime mortgages and credit default swaps of this most recent day of reckoning. The dominating economic axiom during the blowing of bubbles seems to be the inverse of Joe’s Law of Value: your bankable worth is measured by how much more you can extract in payment than you invest in value. Maybe so, but bankable for how long? Never as long as the bubbliophile hopes—like truth, genuine worth always prevails in the long run. The restaurant example above illustrates the essence of the business’s value proposition, which is most likely a direct reflection of the restaurant owner’s personal value proposition. It is the trade secret of all exceptional businesses: providing more in value than they receive in payment. This creates genuine worth that remains bankable in any economic climate. The value of excellence For the story’s sake, we frame the Law of Value as one individual’s experience over the course of a week. In real life, we’ve watched these principles operate in organizations of every size and structure, unlocking optimum productivity and job satisfaction over the long term for individuals, departments, and entire organizations by creating a culture of excellence in the workplace. The ability to provide exceptional value is not limited to high-end businesses or those with luxury-level product lines. The great restaurant in the example could be an expensive fine-dining establishment, a local tavern, or a neighborhood coffee shop. This ability is the driving force behind the stunning success of high-end Lexus and no-frills Southwest Airlines, both of which have not merely survived but thrived in an era when their competitors have struggled to stay afloat. The idea of cultures of excellence within organizations is nothing new, of course; scores of management gurus have made the compelling case for the importance of culture as the fabric that coheres the group enterprise. But the central theme in our perspective is that an organization’s true culture is created not by mission statements, slogans, or abstract policies, but by the quality of the interaction taking place every day within the group. A genuine culture of excellence, in other words, arises from the quality of the relationships within the organization. You create the culture: you invest it with value. You create worth. Creating value The same principle can be applied just as effectively by you individually as by Lexus, Southwest, or your favorite restaurant. Whether you work at the front counter or deep within the organization, you can find ways to add greater value to the business—and that added value will insinuate itself into the fabric of the organization’s culture. Indeed, creating excellence by adding value from within is perhaps the highest calling of any employee within any organization, from the executive suite to the stockroom floor. Ultimately, this translates into a greater perceived worth for you. When you focus on adding more value to the operation than you take in payment, two things happen. First, you ensure you will be consistently and permanently employed because you increase your intrinsic worth. Remember, your company doesn’t pay you because you owe on your mortgage; it pays you because your worth exceeds what you are being paid. This means that while your peers are worrying about justifying their paychecks, you are impervious to such concerns—you already exceed that standard in your normal course of business. Second, you place yourself in a prime position to scale the corporate ladder and rise to positions of greater potential. This happens not because you’re a nice person, or because, gosh, you deserve it, or because you’re recognized for trying really hard, but because the exceptional value you provide to the business and its customers cannot help but be noticed. Many people in corporate America have learned to approach their work with the not terribly productive mindset of trading time for dollars as opposed to trading value for value. But when your focus is on adding even more in value than what you’re getting paid for, like the great restaurant in our example, you create a cycle of advancement that will in time see your position, pay, and influence all increase significantly. Make the Law of Value your north star, navigate by it daily, and you will create the best possible defense against the ebb-tide surges of economic undertow that threaten the very existence of so many. When circumstances grow dim and everyone seems to be hanging on by a thread, you will be the sought-after commodity, the organizational talent that others seek. You will never be without gainful employment. Why? Because, frankly, you’ll be worth it. Bob Burg and John David Mann are coauthors of the national best-seller The Go-Giver (Portfolio, 2007). Mr. Burg is also author of the classic text Endless Referrals; Mr. Mann is editor of Networking Times and wrote the New York Times bestseller The Answer. You can read more about them and download a free chapter of their book at www.thegogiver.com. |