Business Insight Zone

O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!

[O would some Power that gift give us
To see ourselves as others see us!]

~Robert Burns, “To a Louse”

It might be the hardest thing in the world to do.

We marinate in our own thoughts, we reinforce our own habits and beliefs, we wear grooves in our minds that accommodate our practices, whether they’re personal (do you check your calendar before your e-mail, or vice versa?) or collective (if it’s Tuesday, it must mean a staff meeting).

In business, though, we won’t thrive unless we can pull back and see ourselves as though from the outside. The vital questions are easy to say, but hard to answer truthfully:

• How do our customers like us?
• What makes a prospect become a customer?
• How do users want our products to operate?
• What problems are users trying to solve?
• How do the undecided choose between us and our competitors?
• . . .

We at Hoover’s have been asking these questions for a long time, and a loyal customer base suggests that we’ve done a solid job of answering them. But lately we’ve stepped up our efforts, which has led to major improvements to our platform — previously discussed in this post — to answer customer requests, and even to go beyond what customers have thought was possible. (Stay tuned for more on that front; I try not to be too much of a “homer” about Hoover’s products, but it’s hard not to get excited about a set of functionality that’s just so useful for our subscribers.)

As for myself, if you’ve been reading this blog for any time, you’ll know that I like to challenge my own perceptions, because I know how easy it is to get stuck in a rut with one’s thinking. With the start of the new year, I started refreshing my outlook on my work by a couple of simple expedients:

1. Reorganizing my e-mail folders.
2. Buying and using a new type of notebook — not a computer, just a nice bound paper notebook with grid pages.

No big whoop, to be sure — but even these small changes are enough to get me thinking differently.

But now, I want to pose the question to you:

How do YOU get yourself to view YOUR work with fresh eyes?

~

Photo by Upsilon Andromedae.