This quote is an excerpt from A Win Without Pitching Manifesto by Blair Enns. It reminded of a related conversation I heard. It was on a video interview I worked on with a CEO of an integrated Architecture/Construction firm. There are two things from that interview that I’ve thought back to many times and one ties in the idea of difficult business decisions.

First, someone thanked him for making the time to be at the shoot. It was something to the effect of “Thanks for making the time for this, I know you’re a busy man.” He responded with “I’m really not that busy.” Although that may sound counterintuitive, I have heard that this is often true of many of the most effective business leaders. My suspicion is that it is because they figure out the aspects of the business, the difficult decisions that they need to make and that is what they focus on.

The executive mentioned the difficulty in simply making the choice to become an integrated firm or not. This means that they chose to handle both the design aspect of projects and the implementation. Many in the building industry only do one or the other.

This is not something that takes up a predefined amount of time. But it is difficult. That decision could have meant that some other firms might not want to work with them because of feeling threatened (ended up not really the case). Yet making this decision created new project opportunities that they could now handle in a better and different way.

These kind of questions: What business am I in? What is my focus, my specialty? These are questions I am choosing to wrestle with, and am finding clarity as well for moving forward.