Resource Thinking

2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43

Remember the half-joke?

The old billionaire is asked:

- How did you get your first million?

“I came to New York with one cent in my pocket. In the summer, in the very heat. I was thirsty. I bought a lemon for 1 cent, squeezed out the juice, diluted it with water and sold two glasses of the drink for 1 cent. Then I bought two lemons for 2 cents, diluted the juice with water, sold 4 glasses of the drink, bought 4 lemons …

- Then you bought eight lemons … ?!

- No … Then my aunt died and left me a million dollars …

I work individually with a wide variety of people: with successful professionals, and with those who are on the Forbes list, and with those who are on the Forbes list, but Forbes does not know about this.

Yes, some of them have some kind of pronounced abilities. Someone is talented in something. But it was not their abilities and talents that turned out to be the key to their first success. - And access to some resource.

Someone got access to underestimated values or assets, someone to preferential terms of working with a supplier, someone to an exclusive opportunity to work with a certain consumer audience or a monopolist.

After all, no matter how talented Bill Gates was, would anyone know about him now if his mom was not the chairman of the executive committee at United Way International, which included two very influential leaders of the then monster of the computer market, IBM?

Talent alone does not mean anything to success. In addition to it, you need luck and / or constant search activity, and / or a producer, leading to resources. And first of all, on "resource people". Of course, “resource thinking” is also important for this, which is usually established by the parental family.

Resource and poor thinking clearly

Maids in hotels demonstrate clearly resourceful or, on the contrary, meager thinking. If "consumables" have disappeared in the guest's room during the day: bottles of shampoo or bottles of drinking water, then meager thinking suggests not to renew them, at least to the same amount. And resource - to put in twice as much. - Since they have disappeared, then they are needed …

Yes, of course, the latter is unlikely to happen in a three-star hotel. But even in the most luxurious, maids have to be specially selected or trained so that they react according to the algorithm: “Have you noticed that the client needs something? - We will try to satisfy his need based on the available resources and slowly invoice him. Surely something will be done! The resources are there! »

But in a cheap hotel it all depends on the mindset of the maid. A maid with a resourceful mindset will calmly put new shampoos instead of the disappeared ones, and with a meager one - only one bottle of shampoo instead of two or nothing at all.

At the same time, one worker will even find a justification for this: “You need to wash your hair with shampoo, and he is tying it in a suitcase!”. Behind this rationale will be unshakable: “ There are no resources, not enough, they can be lost at any moment! »

And the other will be sincerely surprised when someone statistically shows what "working strategy" she is unconsciously using. But this unconscious strategy is based precisely on the attitudes of meager thinking.

Most entrepreneurs, especially charismatic ones, have a resource mindset. It clearly manifested itself, for example, in the catch phrase of Boris Berezovsky: "There was money, there will be money, now there is no money!"

Imagine their surprise when they discover, for example, at the STRADIS Strategic Diagnostic Harmonization session, that some of their key employees and even managers with insufficient resource thinking are so fanatically trying to save resources that they spend money and working time (say, on the development and implementation of any "saving procedures") is many times greater than the estimated savings. Plus, the quality of the desired result and / or the timing of its achievement suffers.

"Why didn't you come up to me and say that you need to hire another person, increase your budget … ?!" - they are surprised. It is not at all a fact that they would approve of these proposals of employees, but they are always ready to discuss and look for options.

And the fact is that employees with insufficient resource thinking do not even enter their heads to think in the key: “What needs to be achieved, what are the criteria that we have achieved this? -> What resources do we need for this? -> What else, except how to cut back to find, get these resources? -> Which of these options is optimal in terms of the quality of the result, the return on it and the timing of achievement?"

How the foundations of resource thinking are laid in childhood, in the parental family

Today, about how the foundations of resourceful or, on the contrary, meager thinking in childhood are laid.

My boyfriend told me how, in his school years, when he saw that the sugar bowl was empty, he crawled into the closet for a packet of sugar. I was very surprised not to find it there. I'm used to the fact that there is always a supply of sugar on that shelf.

Yes, of course, he understood that his parents replenished the stock, buying it in the store. And that time there was no tragedy - they just started spinning and didn't buy it on time. But his reaction was the reaction of a child with resource thinking: surprise that there is no resource.

Then he calmly called his mother at work and asked if it was possible from a bar where there was always some amount of money for general use (and this is also a sign of a family with a resource-minded mind) to take a part and go buy sugar.

Moreover, it was an ordinary Soviet engineering and medical family. No extra money. But he had never heard of his parents whining and complaining about their absence. But they did not sit idly by either. Whenever possible, my mother, a doctor, worked on a one and a half salary, and my father, an engineer, did not refuse a suitable "shabbat". But all without fanaticism. Not "money for money."

Resource or lean thinking often runs through several generations. A trained young woman recalled how her mother told her that as a child her mother refused to buy her ice cream, because "there is no money." And then it turned out that "all the money" she put on her daughter's savings bank by the end of school. The only trouble is that in the early nineties all these savings depreciated at once.

And yes, their family financially was not like that "medical and engineering". They belonged to the "scientific-party" stratum. And they lived above the average Soviet level. But in conversations they always "had no money."

Poor thinking is passed down from generation to generation. And now my student, finishing school, refuses even to think about paying tuition at a university (and even more so abroad), since then “I would have to ask for tuition”.

It is up to you to choose which mindset to lay down for your children:

Once again, what's important. Not necessary:

• confuse resource thinking with the positive thinking of an idiot who ignores reality: “Son, I know you will succeed! You are the best!"
• thinking resource thinking alone will lead you to success. No, it’s not like that. But its absence, and even more poor thinking, will not allow you to reach your full potential.

Primary source: