If I were you?
I’d take the two words I’m about to give you, write them on a Post-it, and stick them to your desk.
Look at them every day, and at least once, and briefly meditate on them.
Because although they are quite obvious, they actually represent a huge psychological challenge for the vast majority of the human race. A handful of weird individuals do this automatically. But for the rest? It’s a struggle. Possibly even painful.
And yet if you have any true ambition for your business, you have to do it:
Look up.
This isn’t just a metaphor. It’s a physical instruction. Because this idea of where we “set our gaze” on a daily basis is so visceral that you can trigger it by quite literally raising your head. A tiny thing, but with the potential for insane improvement in business performance.
Let me explain.
When you’re running a business, there are just two directions you can look: down, or up.
Looking down means looking into your business. At its workings, its people, its processes, its customers. You are in effect the “god” of your organisation, so you can picture yourself above it, gazing down on your dominion.
This is what most founders, most CEOs, most owners, spend their time doing. They create a world of their business, and inhabit it completely – keeping busy serving customers, managing the team, fixing problems, and operating it like someone with a train set in their garage.
Looking up on the other hand means to stop looking into your business, and to start looking at the world around it. Looking the industry it occupies. Looking at what’s happening “out there”, and the way things are going.
Leaders who do this aren’t so concerned with what’s happening in their business as they are with where their business is going. How is it navigating the world around it? What is its relationship to its competitors, culture, market forces, and so on.
You can think of this as the distinction between running an ocean liner – making sure the passengers and crew are happy, the engine is firing, and everything is ship shape – and actually looking out of the window to see where the thing is going.
It’s not an exaggeration to say that many businesses end up as beautifully run ships literally bobbing around in the middle of the sea being pulled this-way-and-that by the tides because literally nobody is looking out of the window, or wondering where to take it.
It’s the difference between operating the thing and guiding the thing.
And seriously, most people don’t even realise there’s a distinction here. They believe their business “does what it does”, and the difference between success and failure is “how well they do it”. It doesn’t even occur to them that the business is going somewhere. That it is navigating obstacles and tides, and has a choice over whether it will go left or right.
You job is not to make the thing run smoothly.
Your job is to choose between left and right.
Your job is to look up.
This is kinda similar to “don’t work in the business, work on the business”, only I think that phrase is flawed. Because working “on” the business can still be a downward looking activity – another form of operation where you are just “doing stuff” to it. In reality there are 3 levels, not two:
- Working in the business on day-to-day operations
- Working on the business tinkering and optimising it
- Working beyond the business to decide where it’s going
With the first, you’ve got a job. With the second, you’ve got a business. With the third, you’ve got a strategy.
Another good way of thinking about this is: are you focusing on customers or competitors?
Conventional wisdom will tell you that focusing on customers is good, and focusing on competitors is bad – but this is not true.
Focusing on customers, and trying to serve them well, is a downward-looking operational activity which takes no account of the macro-context you’re operating within. You’re still in the bubble of your business.
By contrast focusing on your competitors and how you relate to them is an upward-looking activity. It demands you look beyond your business and to the ocean it’s navigating.
When you do this, you might determine that in order to navigate effectively, gain competitive advantage, and find a “blue ocean”, you might need to serve your customers worse, not better.
Imagine that!
And yet many businesses serve their customers strategically “worse” than their competitors in order to navigate the market effectively. Looking down, you would never come that conclusion – because you just think that “better is better”.
I would suggest that you already know the visceral feeling of looking down. It’s at your desk, head buried in your laptop, details, problems, meetings, people. Your back is hunched, the world beyond has melted away, and you’re “getting shit done”.
There’s a time for that.
But now try the opposite. Away from the desk, away from the office, head up, breathing deeply, thinking, chatting, meditating, speculating, observing.
It’s not the same is it?
That is looking up. And that is where you belong.
