The Art of Business by McIntosh David

Author:McIntosh, David...
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2014-03-13T23:26:55.351000+00:00

Practiced Presence:

Create PRODUCE Connect

Steve Jobs, one of the great creative CEOs, likes to point out that “great artists ship.” They get the work done, out the door, in front of an audience, and into consumers’ hands.

More formally, production encompasses things like procurement, manufacturing, and logistics; further downstream the consumption process includes functions like marketing, distribution, delivery, and customer relations. The process is about making an idea real and getting it to the people who can use it. In the economic flow, production is part of the value chain. In the artistic flow, the same is true but with more emphasis on the presentation.

Great leaders, like great dancers, bring electricity to their performances. They can simply walk into a room, and all the attention shifts to them. They exude a commanding presence. Their aura speaks for them and makes whatever they say or do important to hear. Their performance, their interaction with the others in the room, begins before they even say anything.

It would be misleading to call this ability a gift. It comes from years of practice that prepares them for moments of peak performance. Producing great performances takes practiced presence.

An old joke begins with a passenger asking the cab driver, “Hey, buddy, do you know how to get to Carnegie Hall?” and the cabbie replies, “Yeah, practice.” In business, you don’t see many people practicing. Yes, we get training, like college or business school or those training workshops we all are sent to once in a while. But how often do you see people working on their basic skills, like speaking, writing, negotiating, selling, or mentoring? Not very often at all. In a world of just-in-time and learning-by-doing, it takes a pretty rare person to carve out the time to work regularly on basic skills.

You’ll sometimes see people preparing, but that’s not the same thing as practicing. Before a big sales call, they plan out their offer and how they will counter the likely objections. Before a big presentation, managers get all their PowerPoint slides in order and check all the figures. Then they run through their speech in a perfunctory monotone, focusing more on microphone levels and catching mistakes than on tone, impact, phrasing, or delivery quality. What’s going on is more planning than practicing, more economic than artistic.

The difference between successful artists and unsuccessful artists isn’t just talent. It’s also how much time they spend practicing, both in their youth and as adults. Young ballerinas spend three or four hours a day in class, stretching, doing work on the barre, repeating basic steps again and again. That way, when they perform they’ll be able to do things well, do things the right way, by doing what comes naturally. It’s often called “muscle memory,” and some studies have supported the idea that true memory literally resides there—in the legs of dancers and in the fingers of musicians, and not just in the brain.

In the white-collar world, muscle memory is more of a metaphor, but it’s just as important.

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