Lessons are everywhere, insight also, but most of the time we’re not everywhere. Instead we’re just where we want to be, safe at home, in our (comfort) zone. Quite normal, nothing wrong with that.
It is also normal (wherever you are) to believe or want to that we’re pretty good at what we do. To have some special pride in our hometown or tribe or nationality. It’s the same the world over. And there’s nothing wrong with that either; it’s the human condition. But (you knew there was a but coming, right?) it’s also important to get reminded every so often of how there’s a lot of good and talented folks out there in the rest of the world.
One of our best people just got back from a trip across to the other of side it (the world). A place he hadn’t been before. Big place, famous place, but very other to our western viewpoint. Dangerous maybe. Odd. Not uncivilized as such, but, you know, sketchy? Or weird. Or, well, other.
He was there to assess a printing operation for a client. Just another day (or three) in the busy M & A space. Technical due diligence. Get in there and run the rule over how the locals are dealing with the Big Boy production issues. It wasn’t that he expected there to be water-buffalo in the press room, but Our Man is a world-class flexographer, literally wrote the book on parts of the process, has seen the best of the best, so he was going in there with a firm-but-fair eye.
And he was blown away.
There on the far edge of the other side he met a production manager who’s doing things (for the same multi-nationals that maybe some of you are doing things for) and getting there-from-here in innovative, efficient and profitable ways. And, yeah, you could eat off the press room floor.
Work went well, report went well. Client pleased. Job done. But as a company we got something more than our fee from the assignment. LPC made another valuable contact, and Our Man, it turns out, made a like-minded friend (and not just the Facebook kind). Someone -out there on the other side- who he actually shares far more with than many of the people he’s worked with close to home for all these years. The world is always small when we let it be so.
All the best,