Superpowers on Solid Foundations

In the post-lockdown frenzy of people swapping one place to live for another, we’ve gotten new neighbors all over the neighborhood. The houses behind us and on each side of us sold, and the house at the corner, and on and on in our portion of the village.

The family in one of those houses moved here specifically to get access to a school that is especially good with autistic youngsters like one of their children. Talking about it, the mother looked and sounded like she is in wonder at that daughter, not in distress. It comes with some challenges, the mum said, but it is also a superpower. The daughter taught herself to read by age three. She is academically brilliant. It is simply a matter of having some challenges in other ways.

In heavily technological fields such as where I’ve spent much of my life, I’ve had the privilege of working with several people who are world class geniuses in their specialties. It’s common for them to be somewhere “on the spectrum” toward autism. Not universal, but common.

Fortunately for this particular neighboring girl, her parents recognize it would be a wasteful folly at best and cruel at worst to try to make their daughter conform to the norm. She doesn’t even resemble average. In many ways, she leaves average in the dust. Her parents recognize this. They won’t pressure her to do what most of her peers do. When she reaches adulthood, she may not belong in a typical job. The key will be doing something she’s good at that doesn’t require a lot of social interaction, something that needs her brilliance and doesn’t need high skill in areas that are her weaknesses, regardless of whether it’s a job.

Really, we would all do best that way, but most of us are able to squish ourselves into a box and more or less conform. Someone like her couldn’t and shouldn’t.

I’ve met two novelists (one in USA, one in UK) whose books sell like crazy, for example. That isn’t a job. It can be very insular and not necessarily require a clear understanding of how modern people interact. Jean Auel spent years learning stone-age skills before she wrote Clan of the Cave Bear. (She was at the same table with me at a fundraising dinner.) Elizabeth Moon, whom I haven’t met, has an autistic son and seems to have written The Speed of Dark as a way of learning more about how he experiences the world. In the novel, the protagonist has a job where he can focus on what he does best, work that ordinary people could not do well.

Businesses are made of people, so the same general perspective applies. Yours may be a conventional business with conventional needs, in which case it can operate in conventional ways. But if yours is a company with superpowers doing something an ordinary company couldn’t do, you’ll need to pick and choose. Use ordinary methods where they make sense and make up your own methods where standard practice doesn’t suit you. That requires more wisdom than what an ordinary business can get by with.

As I mentioned in the previous post, I now offer what I’m referring to as coaching services for businesses of modest size, where there isn’t financial latitude to wait long to reap value from an investment. As you would expect of me, it starts with something highly systematic, solidly rooted in facts and objective analysis. It is tailored to produce far more bottom line improvement than my fees (in other words, nicely profitable for the client) from the very first hour.

Remember, before the rocket science, NASA has to do the basics exceedingly well. That’s the focus of my new service.

But if your business can do rocket science or the equivalent in some other field, we can address that too, all under one roof.

The website looks conventional. What you get from behind it is certainly not ordinary. I suggest starting by clicking here to book an appointment. Remember, an initial one-to-one session will only cost you anything if I find you ways to fatten your bottom line by far more than my fee. If I fail to do that, the session is on me. And if you’re an early adopter and decide you want more after that first session, I’ll toss in something extra for free.