I have come to believe over the years that there are some things, maybe many things that can only be discovered and cannot be planned for or thought out in advance. I realize I am coming at this from the POV of an entrepreneur, who does most things this way anyway. But still it is true, I believe.
It also frustrates many people (my wife included) who want to plan things out well in advance. I have already written elsewhere about the futility of long range (and quite often short range) planning—too many pieces are moving around and too many changes are happening day to day in our political-economy for planning to be of much use.
How many economists thought petrol would soar to $145 a barrel two years ago? How many thought it would drop from there to less than $60 a barrel in less than four months? How many thought that Lehman Brothers would go OOB before it actually did?
I personally believe economists can only tell you what has already happened and sometimes they can’t even manage that—it took the Business Cycle Dating Committee of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) a year to make a determination that the US is in a recession. A year! Sheesh, any corner store owner could have made that determination earlier than that. PhD not required.
So while planning may not be of much use, goal setting is. Humans are much better at setting and achieving goals than they are at making plans. I have always liked the US Marine Corps unofficial motto: “Show some adaptability!” Trust me, it will save your life (if you are a marine, blindly following a pre-ordained battle plan will surely get you killed) and your business (if you are a business owner or CEO and, say, in six months car sales drop from an annual run rate of 20 million vehicles in the US market to a demand for just 10 million, your precious plans are useless.)
Just to make things more complex (sorry about that), there are many things in life and business that can only be discovered by experiencing business processes or by living your life. Do you think you can plan out who you are going to fall in love with? I believe that most of us DISCOVER that. (According to Malcolm Gladwell’s thesis in Blink, you might actually discover you love her in the first two seconds after you meet her. Your unconscious mind is at work here. It is terrifically fast and, in complex matters, often a better guide than the best you could do after months of collecting additional data and ‘thinking things through’.)
The first time the woman who was going to be wife kissed me, I got lost on my way home—in my home town no less. I had to stop the car and collect my wits for more than 15 minutes. I had NO idea where I was. Then I realized, that’s the girl for me!
Recently I moved real estate Brokerages. I wanted to be in a place that acted and performed like a team. In this industry, everyone says they want to work in teams but, frankly, that is just so much hooey. In place after place, your biggest competitors sit around the table with you and will take your clients, ideas, inventory if they can.
Did you know that if you ask someone else in our industry to do an open house for you for one of your listings and a Buyer comes in, likes the place, is represented by a Buyer agent and makes an Offer through that agent, you get paid as the listing agent, the Buyer’s agent gets paid but the poor sap who did the open house for you gets nada?
So some young guy or gal, probably new in the biz, gets suckered into doing open houses for you because you are too busy doing your Xmas shopping and he or she gives up say five or six weekends before Xmas to help you out but at the end of the day he or she may get nothing for doing that. The rationale* is simple—this is the way we do it because this is the way we have always done it and this is the way we will always do it because this is the way we have always done it. Got that?
(* Senior agents do have some political cover for this—they say that the new agent, by doing open houses for you, may get some people who come in who are not already represented by an agent and thus may get some Buyer clients for that home he or she is showing or if the Buyer doesn’t like that home then for another one. Pretty tenuous cover, I think.)
Commercial real estate isn’t any better and maybe it’s worse. Many broker-owners compete with their own agents for clients and deals. I can’t think of another industry where this happens on such a widespread basis.
So I came to the new brokerage with the idea that we would try real team selling. When asked to explain it, I could only say what it is not by quoting the above examples and a bunch more.
But over the last five months, from the DOING OF THE WORK, I think we are coming to understand what it might mean. It sure is different and again I believe there was no way we could have planned out what we were going to do in advance—we had to discover it.
I am amazed that so many of the people I work with are willing to live through this experiment with me. The theory is that you are better off with 25% of 30 deals say than 100% of five. Not only are you better off financially (at least in theory), you feel you are part of something bigger than yourself (which most of us crave and need) and you can rely on others to have your back, not stab you in the back.
Now this is not for everyone—REALTORS are notoriously independent and I understand that. There is nothing at our firm that says you have to join the team—be an individual or form your own team, no problem. Just don’t engage in unethical practices.
Some things we have learned is to put three agents on every listing or deal. We are also doing Trade Record Sheets, TRS (which divvy up commission income) that are really new in the industry. Instead of the usual 50/50 or 72/25 TRS, ours look weird: they could be 12.5/12.5/25/50 or 6.25/6.25/43.75/43.75 (yes, we just did one like that!) or 33.33/33.33/33.33 or ….
I won’t go into too much more detail about what we are doing because some of it is proprietary, but we are definitely discovering things as we go.
If you are open to new ideas, opportunity is everywhere in the ‘ether’. The other day I happened to put one file down next to another one and it suddenly occurred to me that I had a match between Buyer and Seller. Despite having my own data base software, it just had not been apparent before. Making connections is often a random event. You just need to SEE it.
Sean Murray in our office had a big insight the other day. Don’t many middle aged, potential condo buyers have homes to sell? What if condo developers allowed us to help them sell more condos by moving the existing homes of their potential clients? Now how did Sean discover that? I can tell you. I asked him to call a condo builder for some info on their project and a light went on when he was talking to them about their problems—this just popped out of the conversation. It was completely fortuitous but Sean was OPEN to the process of discovery.
Another REALTOR friend of mine, Dan Oakes, had another big insight last year. There is a shortage of commercial condos in Ottawa—if you want to own your own place of business, it isn’t easy to do here. So Dan was driving around one day on one of our main streets and he noticed how many private residences there were on major arteries like Carling Avenue, Maitland Avenue, St. Joseph Blvd., Churchill, Woodroffe, etc.
He thought: “Hmm, if the City of Ottawa got their act together, they could rezone all these homes for commercial/residential purposes and, in one fell swoop, create a huge increase in inventory for would-be owners.”
This initiative would have some terrific results:
1. More business owners could own their own place. They would no longer be subject to rental increases set by Landlords, they would have security of tenure, they would have some diversification of risk by owning some real estate in addition to their operating business, they could renovate their premises to their requirements, they could benefit from property value increases.
2. Residents on these main arteries, many of them elderly, would have more Buyers to sell to and at higher prices. I mean who really wants to live on Maitland with 20,000 cars a day buzzing by your living room at more than 60 kph less than 20 feet away?
3. The City of Ottawa which is suffering its own financial problems would get a large increase in their municipal assessment base and a huge increase in realty taxes (commercial rates are around four times the residential rate) while costs for commercial assessment are much lower (very few city services are extended to commercial establishments, who must, for example, pay for their own garbage removal and don’t need schools, play grounds or libraries built for them).
4. Many of these properties are in need of significant repair—their foundations are failing, their roofs need replacing, their facades need refacing, their building envelopes are not weather-proof, their interiors are shabby and so forth. It probably isn’t worth doing if they are used for residential purposes but almost certainly would get done if they were used by a dentist, a CA, a law office, etc.
5. Many of these buildings will be multi-use with second floor apartments or maybe basement apartments with the ground floor being used for commercial uses. So some affordable housing may also come out of this initiative.
6. REALTORS would make more money too. And that surely is a good thing!
Now this makes a lot of sense but don’t hold your breath for the City of Ottawa to act. This is one of the worst run cities in Canada with a staff that is more bureaucratic than the guys running the UN.
Anyway, do you think Archimedes could plan out how he was going to figure out how to measure the density of King Heiro’s irregularly-shaped, gold crown before the King of Syracuse lost patience and executed him? He needed to be open to new possibilities. He subsequently noticed that large, irregular objects (like the male of our species) cause water levels in public baths to rise. And so, he discovered the principle that the buoyancy force exactly equals the weight of an immersed object and with that, he immediately recognized he could measure the density of the crown to ensure its purity was as advertised.
I would bet that things like Amazon’s use of its relational data base (asking the question: “Would you like to see what other people who ordered this book (CD/DVD/etc) also ordered?”) was discovered from contact with their client base. This is why pre-selling is so important for start-ups or even for large companies that are starting a new division or selling a new product or service. Contact with customers (and potential suppliers too, BTW) will lead to many, many changes and improvements that can not be found any other way than by the actual doing of a thing.
Dr. Bruce
Postscript: I think most artists also find that their art is a process of discovery. For example, a sculptor may discover or uncover the image in a block of stone. A novelist may discover or unearth things about their characters as the book is being written. I think that the scriptwriters for the hit television show LOST probably are discovering the story as they go along. I would like to talk to one of them. There is probably no way that for a story with: a) such a large ensemble cast, b) back stories that are woven into the fabric of the show, c) timelines that are extremely hard to track, d) characters that behave in a manner that is consistent with their back story development and e) plot lines that constantly delve into the past to resolve present conundrums, could ever be written in a conventional manner—they are open to the process of discovering the story as they go. And so should you be in whatever field of endeavour you toil in—science, business, politics, arts, social enterprises, etc…
Postscript: You can become more creative and more open to discovery by: a. getting lots of rest, b. getting some exercise, c. not drinking and thinking, d. don’t take drugs, e. focus on a problem then stop if a solution does not present itself, f. sleep on it– let the subconscious work on it for awhile, g. focus on it again, h. get some more exercise, i. sleep on it again, j. don’t suffer from the not-invented-here syndrome: if someone has a better idea or way of doing things, adopt it immediately, k. read a lot, l. draw, m. write notes, especially at 3 am when you wake up with a good idea, n. talk about it to someone you can trust– verbalize, o. listen to your subconscious and your ‘gut’ feelings, p. be open to learning new things and new experiences (this keeps you young at every age), p. do the hard stuff, q. exercise your mind!
Here is a trivial example: What is the non-obvious next number in this series?
1,3,5,7,…
