Toby Hecht

Wow, long time since I visited this site…well ‘07 was a busy year.  Someone just reintroduced me to Toby Hecht and his site http://www.theajinetwork.com the Aji network. Toby is a consulting associate who has been doing great work in educating people with distinctions in wisdom and ethics in a business context and offering the tools to dramatically increase your profits. 

Here are a couple things I want to share from his site to give you a flavor of his work…

            “Either a person accumulates knowledge and power to take care of their financial concerns and live a good life, or the market place determines their possibilities and they become marginalized, often without even realizing it.” 

“For people with uncommon financial and quality of life ambitions, common knowledge and common sense are the problem, not the solution. Only uncommon knowledge and uncommon sense enables a person to have the competitive advantage, identity, autonomy and organization necessary to succeed. (Living a good life with an income in the top 5% – $150,000 to 0.01% – $3,600,000 is uncommon.)

“This excerpt is a “First Talk” about ambition. Personal ambition is a fundamental skill of accumulating uncommon power for producing competitive advantage, identities of trust and value, autonomy and a powerful organization. Ambition produces action. It makes powerful choices possible. It is a narrative that brings forth moods of passion, assessments of situations and action, strategies and tactics, and skill.”

Check out Toby’s work,  I highly recommend it.

Collaboration or Competition? Share your opinion…

I want to offer to start using this space for businesses to share information and practices that could raise the standards for how we do business.  My intention is that through collaboration and sharing of knowledge we increase the chances of success.  What’s inspired me is as I have moved around the country in the last ten years I see pockets of success with certain parts of a business, and found that information to be valuable to other businesses.  That was the reason I founded a roundtable discussion and what has become a NARI chapter,  seven years ago – I found contractors very interested in what other GC’s where doing, and they didn’t have a way to easily discover that. 

There are a few challenges with this… One problem is getting the right information out fast enough to everyone that needs it in a way that could make it useful.  Another one is the idea many have about competition with others, making sharing what works for you seem like a really bad idea.  Another might be the fear and doubt people have about what really does work, what you can do and what you can’t – what works for one company may not work for another!  These are all valid concerns, and I intend to explore them one at a time and see what makes more sense – collaborate or compete?  Your thoughts and ideas are most welcome…