Growth Hack For Startup Founders -Naseem Javed
The Mental Leaps
Back in the last century, if you were the CEO of a major Fortune 500 organization, you commanded from your huge office from the very top floor of one of the tallest skyscrapers in the city. As the oxygen of the organization was sucked upward, you and the rest of the team knew with certainty that this was the center of the universe. Of course this worked wonders, and this format also provided the best of the best business minds to deploy the best ‘hardmental’ strategies of the period.
The Hardmental Phase:
Hardmental thinking is a state of mind where the mind acts like a goal keeper, catching nicely baked generic ideas as they are shot into the net. Hard asset centricity played a key role; it built factories to produce and move goods. The hard mentalists applied special skills sets to deflect some ideas but catching the right projectiles. The execution styles were based on choosing the right hard asset based strategies from the very top floor and trickling those ideas as downward flows. The land was hungry and too many great ideas were flying around like bees. The happy dawn of America and Western image supremacy was assured on the Hardmental thinking clock.
Symptoms of Hardmental Thinking: when mind can only see ‘hard assets centricity’; for example when a bicycle maker considers a ‘motorcycle’ or ‘car’ as part of their manufacturing plan it would be an out of scope taboo. This model is locked into brick and mortar mentality.
The Footmental Phase:
The layers of time and the spinning of world polished new thoughts and free flow of ideas.
These wonders forced the CEOs to come down from the clouds to the ground floors and deal effectively with issues on the office and factory floors. Footmental thinking is about the ability to immediately sort through business realities in real time—it is being on your feet and in the trenches of every element of the organization. It is more like facing the live music and discovering the various dancing styles of decision making.
Creative and complex business decisions making and strategic execution of such decisions demand very extensive skills. It also requires stamina for running around and continually seeking answers. This means you get out of the office and do some desk hopping, consensus building, crisscrossing floors, and doing a lot of listening. Success results from the constant in and out of regional offices and branches, and triumph will be assured when you are flying across cities and continents. The face to face cumbersome meetings and the constraints of the 9-5 work time segments ruled.
This was the era of ‘footmental’ style of operations where agility of feet and stamina to run around assured rapid and quality decision making. The footmental practice created agility and the modern age of business erupted.
Symptoms of Footmental Thinking: Out of control running around where being lost like headless chicken is considered very hard work. Being overly diluted and tired in traffic jams while pushing away old establishment agendas brought on a severe case of busylepsy.
The Softmental Phase
Softmental is a state of limitless, boundary less, timeless free flow thinking on ‘soft power asset management’ issues. In this new global age, it’s more about the unique mental stamina needed to process all kinds and types of information, with hundreds of interactions going on at the same time. The parties involved are scattered all over the nation or globe and challenges are processed in real time. Month long trips and seasonal reviews will give way to answering questions and solving issues in one single day and frequently every single day. Softmental thinking is more like being a conductor of the orchestra and while playing complex all kinds of global styles of music but all from one concert hall. The mental powers are tested by creating new music while being attacked by multi-directional sounds in different tempos all the times. If you pay attention right now and close your eyes as you sit in your large office, you could possibly hear the highs and lows of those ‘jambalaya notes.’
During the good old days to start a mega project founders build factories and product lines and executed all the production lines before the ‘first item of production’ left for the store shelves. The hard asset management teams provided all the bricks and mortar execution and all the ready cement flows came naturally. The speed of the machines got adjusted on the production lines and rate of quality and speed of delivery governed the cash flow.
Today it’s all about ‘soft power asset management’. These skills are required in order to appreciate and to construct massive cathedrals of digital architectures where in geometrically balanced sections of hierarchal subdivides global age skills become the new chessboard. In such massive innovative thinking, old knowledge skills would end up flying like a lost mosquito randomly searching for a bite. New Softmental thinking has its own digital intellectualism intertwined with global age thinking and executions skills. Once the creative dreams get properly aligned and the latter-day hard asset management teams actually start constructing the dreams, the entire business model successfully gets tested in real time well in advance with soft-power execution.
Hardmental thinking built the chains of old luxury hotels during an entire century; Softmental thinking build powerhouse “aggregator cyber brands and offer thousands of hotels to choose from” within easy fingertip reach. This is like achieving 100% performance in 1% of time, efforts and cost and without any brick and mortar. True hard asset formation is critical for success but now soft asset pre-deployment is a prerequisite.
The last trillion dollars worth of enterprises were originally conceived in digitally wire-framed concepts before hard asset planning and development kicked in. In the old hardmental age, first streets were dug-up and massive construction was planned before mega shopping centers were opened. Today, sophisticated conveyer belts of digital plans and data management is deployed before constructing shopping centers and warehouses of hard structure hierarchies. Big picture thinking is now used to see the process from beginning to end. Supply chains are now a state of mind rather than divisions holding boxes and swinging in chains in their own little world of rushing deliveries. Time has come to differentiate success models based on cyber cathedrals which build virtual retails versus the cemented structured shopping malls. The hardmental minds must transform hard asset execution to a state of ‘soft-power asset creating softmental execution.
In softmental spaces first ‘full blown floor to ceiling room’ ideas are properly incubated with massive integration of big data and conceptual mobilization of applied supremacy deployment. These are combined with global understanding, wisdom and global age knowledge which later allow connection with the conveyor belts of global consumerism. This is not reverse engineering of the products and services, but reverse engineering of the hardmental leap into softmental performance. This is the global age where other new types of smarts and new logic will dictate the untraveled paths to victory.
Symptoms of Softmental Thinking: little or no regards to what floors filled with workers or noisy factories are currently doing; rather there will be fully focused energy on wire-framing brand new advancements ideas under techno-calamity landscapes and new global-age consumerism.
“Color your hats and label your personalities”
days are being crushed into “Global Age Execution Styles.” This is the LEAP from hardmental to softmental. The days of quick blink holster draws were replaced by ‘time and motion study’ experts. Now global age skills create wired-frame-dreams, fully functional, integrated and executable plans and this is where the steel will be tested.
Today without demonstrable qualities of ‘softmental’ readiness to cope, ‘openly timeless’, ‘boldly outbound’, ‘intellectually up-scaled’ with ‘global age’ savvy inputs, no executive can properly function in this open hyper-connected world. The days of road runners are now replaced by dark and silent globally connected star chambers. To make good music in a noisy jungle, one side is the utter and complete silence and on the other side is full and complex appreciation of global musicology. This shift leads to success and is a must for winning in today’s global economy.
The Hardmental phase, received well baked ideas easily flowing in; the footmental phase saw those ideas needed endless chasing and now in the softmental phase, true leadership is about ‘soft asset centricity over the global landscape and figuring out the in and out flows of operations.
If footmental demanded running speed, the softmental demands brand new global age fluidity and hyper-speed simultaneous processes of world class decision making, while being connected with dozens of global cities. The beauty of this is that it is all conducted in real time.
Achievement is more about being well informed at bullet speed and being smart ready for complex-decisions in real time. It is not about hand holding and time consuming meetings where convincing the other ‘misinformed’ become the goals. The new global age executives are achieving whatever they want to achieve in whatever corporate universe, in whatever style and whatever time zones they wish to operate. They are liberated and not boxed in by 9-5 formats. They are champions and are not dragging incompetency or mediocrity luggage.
In a world of commerce, where the sun never sets, in a universe of global entrepreneurialism where good ideas are blossoming very second, and in a global age life style that allows the best of innovative minds to successfully engage on real world-wide business affairs, new global age thinking has created a new dawn. The only boundaries are those we put on ourselves. It is time to realize this boundless environment and confidently embrace the unlimited possibilities available.
Those still waiting to return to their offices on Monday morning and lingering in a series of meetings which fill their week until Friday afternoon are simply being left behind. The dawn of the internet of things promotes limitless advance features and with rapid upgrades and enhancement still on the rise, hundreds of industries that thrived in the old sluggish 9-5 models will have little or any relevancy left.
Dominos Fall on Petro-Dependency:
Now that the abundance of oil-supplies have seriously prolonged the expectancy of peak-oil days, making oil a less important resource in this global age of ‘technoclamity’ is transparent. This is an age where tsunamis of free technologies are overtaking functionalities, lifestyles and corporate operations,. The demands for oil will not be slowed by new types of low mileage cars but rather by the massive elimination and daily ‘need’ of a car. Consider this in the light of the critical component essential for peak hour traffic jams necessary for physical meetings. The new power and status symbols are hidden in “office-less-presence and purely leisure driving”. There may still be some 9-5 operations left in order to assure that the warehouses are maintained and the assembly lines operate effectively. However, robotization will replace most of the white, blue and pink collar workers. The 2020 and beyond workplace era will have an entirely different look and feel.
Escape from Office-dependency:
Global age is an office-less age. The deniers can scream; the heavy filing cabinets have been melted down and the real need of core decision making expertise have already flown out of the corner office windows. Today’s offices are left for old fashioned 9-5 workers. The domino fall of this side will be the biggest life style altering change ever seen since the appreciation agrarian systems
Payroll freedom from Job-dependency:
This transition will erupt very suddenly and is ready when the millions of new emerging agile enterprises embrace the COPCAM code “constant-online-presence-constant-advancement-mode”. The COPCAM code is a constant global age hyper-processing model of corporate agendas where the large old fashioned bureaucratic establishments are shredded into fragmented shiny crystals. It is a model where free and independent hyper active decision making are fashioned under master philosophies and entrepreneurial spirits. Business is always open and thinking and decision making is not locked into any time zone.
The global age executives must be fully re-trained so they will “not” drive for the rest of their lives to a typical downtown core. They will visit and engage with hundreds and maybe even thousands of such downtown cores in hundreds of cities on a daily basis. This is a new global mentality slowly being discovered. The modern day challenge is to create armies of global-age executives. The job security is not in the job titles. Global age ‘execution’, it’s not in the ‘corner-offices’, but in the monumental Mental Leaps. Picture yourself functioning in an environment without boundaries; see yourself soaring to unlimited accomplishment.
Beneficiaries: Next generation business leaders, entrepreneurs, job-creators, game changers, purveyors of prosperity, global age trotters and alpha-dreamers.
Enemies: Ivory towers, fortified old establishments, rigid hierarchies, old school thinking and old school marketing and branding.
Adjustments: Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate. Audit the entire business model. Create a global age world class dialogue and look deeper into your internal management pool and explore all hidden talents and realign new directions guided by a polished vision. Identify your mental style, adjust and make a leap. It will work.
About the Author:
Naseem Javed is a corporate philosopher and founder of the Image Supremacy Movement.
His recent work on entrepreneurial leadership and innovative performance Mentorian Worldwide www.mentorian.comis getting global attention.
