TroubleShooter » Inspirations

treadmill or travelator?

Colin Beveridge — Wed, 07 Apr 2010 09:59:54 +0000

How does your career path look, like a treadmill or like a travelator?

Picture credit: lars hammar

For most people it’s fairly easy to tell because they are head down, covering the same ground – day in, day out. They are relentlessly driving the treadmills that power our organizations.

But even those who believe that they are striding purposefully towards a goal, using a travelator to accelerate their progress, may find that they are actually on a treadmill – albeit with a much longer band. Travelators may save time and energy but don’t generate power.

Getting to a destination quickly isn’t much good unless you have something purposeful to do when you arrive.

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Deceptive appearances

Colin Beveridge — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 13:17:53 +0000

Enjoying a good stiff cappuccino in a coffee-shop the other day, when a young woman came in wearing a paint-smattered smock.

Picture credit: Arty Smokes

So was she a playgroup assistant, or a renowned artist? I will never know.

But it made me think how quickly we can jump to conclusions from first appearances – and how fertile our imagination can be, if we give it some space.

our brains are quick to jump to conclusions but our minds are more imaginative when we give them some thinking space.

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Reputations are never taken away

Colin Beveridge — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 10:28:22 +0000

A good reputation is hard-won and easily lost. But the lost reputation has invariably been given away by the actions of the holder, rather than been taken away by somebody else.

Picture credit: Shoot Art, Not Each

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I’m a visionary, get me out of here

Colin Beveridge — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 11:48:38 +0000

If prophets are despised in their own land, where does that leave Visionaries – are they trapped or liberated by their own insight? The V word has increasingly wide currency but is far more often misappropriated than warranted. So how do you recognise a true visionary among the pretenders?

Picture credit: krish.tipirneni

Well there is an obvious distinction between self-declared and acclaimed visionaries, the former generally appropriate importance to themselves while the latter usually, but not always, have a substantive claim to visionhood.

Of course, many people may have what we glibly call Vision but only a few truly effective Visionaries will recognise the importance of joining up the intellectual and operational frameworks that connect vision, strategy and delivery; thereby lies the potential for true value, dynamic quality and core capability.

Who do you think are the real visionaries of the present day – and why are they worthy of the term?

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