Just Do It!

Having flown into New York for a brief business trip, I once again find myself in the familiar place of “virtumulti”-tasking. Clients in Europe and the US go on with their scheduled calls, the NY based business appointments are kept, and the holiday buzz and the lighting of the Christmas tree at Rockefeller Center that will disrupt today’s NYC traffic won’t stop life’s on-going performance.

Nothing unusual about such heightened level of alertness, activity and global holographic presence. But as the anxiety levels of time zones, jet lag, multiculturalism and performance expectations rise, I keep on thinking that the common denominator in the seamless operation of such complexity is trust and faith in our desirability to overcome whatever it is we need to overcome. And plenty of times the issue is the other people left physically behind.

Do these team members in the other continent feel secure in my absence? Can they still rely on my help, availability, virtual presence? Can business go on as usual while I am gone with a minimum time delay due only to the time difference?

Multinationals have been at this game for decades. But for smaller companies and individual clients for whom global and international projects may be less common, trust, relationships and reliance on the whole team is vital.  So, let’s get clear on the expectations, the deliverables and agree on who will do what when and then just do it. (*see note below).

Do people get thrown off because they are in unfamiliar territory, outside their office box, their comfort zone? Sure they do – it’s part of human nature. However, problems can be assessed by the quality of their solutions.

While solutions may not be immediately visible or within reach, over time and with the right mix of people, ideas, ingenuity and of course the appropriate resources – including the trust and determination to fix whatever needs to be fixed – the challenges can be transformed into processes of planning and execution.

So, you must have guessed by now that I am thinking of a specific solution to some problem. And I know that the great thing about problems is the way you end up finding their solutions. Getting to utilize all the available kind of support each one of us has at his/her disposal, whether it is people, points of reference, money, ideas, infrastructure or whatever it takes, is really dependent on the degree of your own decisiveness. So, don’t let go of your belief that you can always try – and try a bit harder until you know for sure that you’ve done your absolute best.

Oh, and don’t forget: keep on building the trust with the people that help you do all the things you do – because even if you think you are all alone and you do everything yourself, the truth is that someone is giving you the strength to go on….

* I cannot think of the phrase and not make the attribution to Nike’s  ‘Just Do It’ ad, that first came out back in 1988. It quickly became both universal and intensely personal. It spoke of sports. It invited dreams. It was a call to action, a refusal to hear excuses, and a license to be eccentric, courageous and exceptional. It was Nike.