People don’t really say “how do you do?” anymore, but it will be an unusual encounter where you won’t get asked “what do you do?” pretty early on.
I’ve had various answers to this question over the years, most of them fairly accurate like “I’m a clerk in the post office” and some not quite so accurate like “I’m a financial advisor” (which really meant I sold insurance).
In the last four years it’s gotten more tricky, now when I tell people that I help business owners, customer service staff, sales people and managers to exceed targets, they generally look at me like I have four heads and ask the question again.
People want to put us all in boxes, we want to know that Mick is a guard, Kate is a teacher, Johnny sells cars and Mary’s got a good job working for the bank, but the world is changing, and it’s not that easy anymore to pigeonhole people based on their primary occupation. Several years ago in his book “The elephant and the flea” the author Charles Handy spoke of a future where many of us would be what he called “portfolio” workers in that we would derive income from several different sources.
Many of these sources would not be at all visible to the outside world, and most of them would not even be what we traditionally called “work”. As we speak there are neighbours of your’s busy making money trading on ebay, testing computer games or even playing poker with Canadians.
In the past twenty years there have been many changes to what Irish people traditionally called work, a great number of people have become financially successful via property, a great many farmers primary occupation is paperwork and there are more and more people deriving their income through the entertainment industry, whether it’s in ringtones, websites or computer games.
The great thing is that no matter what the work that people do, there will always be a need for entrepreneurs to start it, salespeople to sell it, customer service staff to service the customers and wherever one or more are gathered on a project there will always need to be managers there to manage it, and you better believe that there will always be targets, and then bigger targets, and then even bigger targets.
So whether it be the manafacture of hydraulic equipment, landscape gardening, developing software or running a nightclub, the same basic skillset needs to be there to do it really well, these are the skills of running a business, sales, customer service and management, these are the foundations and after that if you can build better services, make quieter hydraulics, provide a better nightclub or grow better geraniums then you’ll be well on the way.
I help people with the “how” of sales, management, entrepreneurship and customer service so that people can really shine when they do what they do well, it’s not about what they do anymore, it’s about how they do it.
Those who do it brilliantly will be the successes of the future, those who do it poorly will eventually find themselves doing something else, it’s the way Darwin explained the world, the survival of the fittest and it’s no different now than it was all those years ago.
