The Hindu Business Line : Compute COIL to stir from ‘the burning platform’

You are probably a successful businessman, but are you good at being you? Or is life just plodding along on a road to nowhere? If the answers to these questions are no and yes, respectively, Scott W. Ventrella offers help in Me, Inc. www.wiley.com). The book is not about making your life more like a business; it tells you how you can use some of the best ideas from the most successful companies.

But what’s so great about business that we need to draw insights from it for being ourselves? Excellent companies and exceptional individuals have a vision, focus on their customers, manage by fact, empower people, and never stop trying to improve, says Ventrella.

“In the final analysis, all business is deeply personal,” he declares. “Organisational behaviour is essentially about the way in which individuals conduct themselves as they collectively work toward common business goals.”

The book guides you through a dozen milestones to help you ‘master the business of being you’ and “get better organised, live more authentically, navigate transitions, and achieve greater balance in your life.”

Begin, therefore, on week 1, at ‘the burning platform’, where you have to quickly decide whether to try to put out the fire, call for help, or jump. It is the catalyst for change that will push you out of the ‘complacency zone’, explains the author. Complacency zone is status quo where you feel stuck, and are perhaps ‘always making excuses for yourself’. This is one of the three zones people live in, says Ventrella; the other two zones are of crisis and purpose. He invites you to the purpose zone because, like vision for companies, purpose gives meaning to individuals.

Watch out for the crisis zone, which can make you feel ‘lost and overwhelmed’. It is ‘an extremely stressful place to be,’ and therefore you need to take action fast, advises the author.

To urge you into stirring from the comfort of complacency, Ventrella suggests a simple exercise: compute your COIL or ‘cost of inefficient living’. Costs of unattended problems, be they of career or health, family or spiritual life, can be financial, opportunity, emotional and so on. “COIL is like an iceberg: There a few obvious, visible financial costs at the tip, but there are many more hidden costs…”

In week 2 of the Me, Inc. practice, you would establish your platinum standard, something that doesn’t change, no matter what challenges you face in life, much like platinum which ‘doesn’t rust, corrode, shrink, ex pand, or break down in any way’.

The final milestone is to accept that change is the only constant. “An exceptional life is a never-ending journey and requires continuous improvement,” observes the author. “To be sure, striving for continuous improvement does not guarantee an easy or blissful life. In fact, it requires sacrifices, trade-offs, hard decisions, and even suffering.”

The book wraps with a question, thus: “Remember, you are the CEO of Me, Inc. If you were an employee of the company, would you follow you?”

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