It's Not About Me

I'm reading a great book: "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose" by Eckhart Tolle.

No, it's not your typical traditional IT or business book and, yes, it's on the Oprah Book Club list, but don't let these two facts keep you from reading it. Trust me. It's a great read. I'm only half-way through it and it's already affected how I view things in my personal and business lives. Hence this blog.

I can't tell you how many times over the past few years I've run into companies that have really great technologies but can't seem to get out of their own way to make a real business out of them or really drive them to their full potential. I've also encountered too many companies that are hyper-focused on what their competitors are doing or saying about them and as a result miss out on market and business opportunities.

Read Tolle's book and you'll learn that our egos may have a lot to do with both scenarios.

Do companies have egos? Absolutely. Companies take on the egos of the people who run them and the employees that comprise them. Companies get stuck on "the technology behind the product" because of their egos. Companies take on a defensive posture about competitive technologies or competitors because of ...yep, their egos. Companies that don't get this and let their individual (or collective) egos lead them, end up ultimately limiting themselves, says Tolle.

Let's put this in storage terms. A company that spends its time in a defensive posture about its de-dupe ratios or de-dupe process, for example, ultimately ["limits itself and keeps it from taking effective action]." Similarly, a company that spends the majority of its time saying how good its technology is (and spending all its dollar resources there), limits itself. It misses out on opportunities to improve, promote and leverage its technology. This company doesn't change. It doesn't evolve.

I won't go into why our egos do this and how to get them to stop doing it; I'll leave that up to you to discover when you read the book. Still on the fence?

Consider the following (excerpted from Tolle's book):"The most rigid structures, the most impervious to change, will collapse first." And ask yourself, know any companies like that?