Thinking Big
There is a slogan "Think Big" and I have been considering if I should start to advertise my skills with it in my CV.
For the last few years, I have aimed to ensure that I know the big picture on what I am working on, before I start to architect or design solution for it.
There have been cases where this has resulted with a surprise in that the person whose responsibility it was to understand and document the big picture had a wrong understanding about it.
If I had just done as ordered, I would have designed an implementation to a wrong issue so it has clearly proved its worth.
Sometimes when I have done this, I have gone too far above what I was supposed to do, and I have found bad strategy in my unit or in another organization unit.
And then I have had the dilemma of considering if I should inform to the persons concerned about my view or not.
One time that this happened, I should have passed my strategy idea through six organization layers, so I opted to write it in an email instead. And at that time I got my “No” answer from the CEO. But the recent news tells me that his follower has answered “Yes” to the same case. I take that as a proof that I had surpassed the CEO in my strategy analysis of that case.
There are times when I have imagined new business to companies as well. Here the best example is quite old, from 1996, when I was working in Telecom unit of Tieto. Tieto is largest software service company in Nordic countries.
I suggested that we should develop a solution that you know today best with the name “Skype”.
My suggestion went through the normal layers higher up until it was rejected by the CEO. Reason for that was very understandable: this solution would have competed with our customers.
But when 15 years later Microsoft bought Skype with 8.5 billion dollars I couldn’t help comparing that the price was more than the net value of Tieto, with less than 2 billion. And I have to wander if we could have made it before Skype and/or better than how they did it.
I apply Thinking Big also when I design solutions. There have been cases where one of my first thought for implementation was “should we co-operate on this with company XX?”. But so far every time I have taken my idea to the middle management, they have always rejected it.
Also on sales/pricing, I estimated once that there is over 50% of chance of cloning and reselling the solution we were selling for at least 10 more times. I asked from the Director if I can sell it with a minor loss, but she rejected this and we lost the deal.
All-in-all my experiences from Thinking Big have been only barely more positive than negative. But I still haven’t given up the hope that one day I will succeed in it, in a manner that will more than pay for all of the failures I have had with it so far. So I am not planning to quit doing it.
In case Your Company is only for a person that can think independently and does not take too long to train onto his work, I can answer to that: “Yes, easily”. And the truth is that I worry more about doing it too well, than not succeeding with that.