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The ability to grab opportunities (View Comments)
Walter E Vieira is a senior management consultant who started India’s first Marketing Consulting Company (MAS) in 1975. He offers consulting and training services to companies in India, S E Asia, Africa and USA, over three decades.
Posted On Friday, May 21, 2010 at 03:01:55 PM
Reading Ries and Trout’s Horse Sense made me think of all the boys in school who had consistently stood first in class, year after year. I have not heard of most of them for a long, long time. Some joined the IFS (Indian Foreign Service) and have yet to become ambassadors. Some joined the private sector and have yet to become CEOs. By 55, they should have. Some became doctors and lawyers and I know that they could do with some more ‘practice’ or ‘clientele’ just to make ends meet.
What put me into this reverie was Ries’s statement that ‘in the dairy, cream rises to the top. In daily life, it’s generally not true. It’s mostly milk at the top of the corporate bottle’. Intelligence is a two-edged sword. Too little and you can’t cope with the corporate paperwork; writing memos, travel arrangements. Too much and you are out of touch with reality. You suffer from the absentminded professor syndrome.
Top executives come from the middle of the IQ curve. As the college president said to the faculty. Be nice to your A students because they will come back and be your colleagues, but be exceptionally nice to your B and C students because they will come back and give us a new auditorium and a new science building’.
Top executives may come from the middle of the IQ curve. Peter McColough, former Chairman of Xerox, made the same point about his Harvard School class of 1949. ‘The record of accomplishment corresponds negatively with the standing of the class’. The top people did not do that well. The one-third in the middle did. The guys who got the highest marks tended to be in the middle in accomplishment.
Why is this? Why does success in the classroom generally not correlate with success in a profession? The smarter people are, the more they depend on themselves. After all, they know everything. They depend only on themselves to get ahead. Less intelligent people are more likely to look for others to help them up the ladder, and to look, for opportunities and grab them.
I never wrote articles earlier. All I wrote as a working executive was memos, minutes and reports. Then a student at a management college where I taught marketing married a journalist. She spoke to her husband about me, because he was desperately looking around for someone to write a regular column on marketing for Business World. He asked me. I said I would try. That was 15 years ago. I have been writing a column every month ever since – and some more. I had grabbed an opportunity, and not just said ‘No. I’ve never done it before’.
And opportunities do not just arise in the environment. They are not presented to us by others, as the earlier incidents show. They can be inherent in us. They can be accidents that we may take to be calamities but that we can turn into opportunities. A young singer with a fine soprano voice was assigned to perform The End of a Perfect Day for admiring relatives. When his adolescent voice cracked and broke at the family gathering, he discovered he had the ability to make people laugh. The singer-cum-comedian was Bob Hope!
The goal-oriented person would have said, ‘I am not going to let this incident stop me from becoming a professional singer’. The hard work-oriented person would have said, ‘I have to practice more.’ But successful people take advantage of accidents. They see an opportunity in a calamity and grab it.
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