Ever wonder what keeps you on the wrong side of earning that coveted entry into the enviable 1% club? It’s not that you don’t have great ideas. In fact, I would say almost everyone I have ever met in my career has shared an idea with me I thought was great. Let me explain a bit.
Ten years ago I took a leave of absence from my budding profession in consulting (call it a quarter life crisis) to explore the world. Part of that journey found me driving a taxi in Maui for several months before eventually returning back home in Boston. A great experience in and of itself, but you are probably thinking who cares. Well, shortly thereafter, my consulting brain turned on and I was thinking of ways to disrupt the inefficient taxi business. I sat down one evening with a group of friends in 2010 and came up with the model for what most people know today as UBER.
Call it bull, but in reality, my idea was not that unique. In fact, I bet I was one of over hundreds if not thousands of people who had that similar idea. The difference between me sitting here in an office writing this blog versus a mega yacht comes down to ‘EXECUTION’! Execution is the quintessential ingredient that sets the most successful firms and entrepreneurs apart.
Let’s face it we have all sat down at one time or another and come up with several great ways to solve a problem. What stopped most of us dead in our tracks was figuring out how we were actually going to make that great idea come to fruition. Some of us probably tried, spending countless time, money, and brain power on the endeavor but ultimately succumbed to the obstacles, unexpected delays, and detours that inevitably occur. Darwinism kicks in and only the rare few actually reach the top of the mountain and get to take in the view.
When you think of your business, there are undoubtedly countless issues and problems that we strive to solve and while many firms can easily hire the ‘ideas’ it’s not so easy to hire the ‘execution’. Great firms and managers understand the life blood of their business relies on making their ideas become a reality. How can you as a decision maker decide in a just a few short hours of interviews if you are hiring that superstar who will show you the promise land or whether you’ve just added another sweet talker that can’t put pen to paper? Truth is, unless you have a tremendous amount of rigor around your hiring process, it’s a crap shoot. The solution is to find those folks who have a proven track record of guiding firms out of that endless black hole of failed initiatives. A firm that can partner with you as you navigate each step of the tenuous execution process, showing guidance, leveraging past experience, saving you the precious commodity of time, and bringing a determination that does not accept failure as an option.
Citisoft has had the privilege of leading some of the most complex and visible projects in the financial services industry over the past 20 years. While it’s a given that firms have always looked to hire us for our insightful thought leadership and cutting edge ideas; it’s the execution which has many leading investment managers, technology vendors, and service providers repeatedly picking up the phone to have us lead them through their most complex problems.
