Leadership

Business Isn't About You - It's About Business

By Steve Tobak

Updated on: January 21, 2011 / 3:25 PM EST / MoneyWatch

Lately I'm thinking that folks are getting an overdose of advice that's more or less eye-ball catching and self-serving and not enough about what will really help them make something of themselves.

What gives me that impression? I don't know, maybe I've just seen one too many attention-getting headlines that, while entertaining, don't really add a whole lot of value for business readers.

For example, I really don't think ...

That's because business isn't about you. It's also not about your career, your generation, your stress, your race, your gender, your religion, your holiday beliefs, or some psychopathic misfit's childish attempt at getting attention by disrupting the grown-up world's business.

Business is about business. This may be counterintuitive, but if you want to be successful in the real world, you have to stop thinking about yourself and, instead, focus on the business. In fact, the closer you come to where "the rubber meets the road," the more successful you'll be.

Here are five examples of the kind of decision-making that successful people spend their work days focused on, i.e. where the rubber meets the road:

Figuring out what to do when your product isn't going to meet customer expectations or the specs you promoted.
Deciding how many and which people to lay off.
Knowing what to do when the customer that accounts for 14 percent of the company's revenue cuts its forecast in half.
Making tradeoffs between cost and features of a new product - without having enough information to know which will matter most to customers.
Determining how to respond when a competitor has just launched a leapfrog product and you didn't see it coming.

The truth is that nobody gets very far in business by being selfish and self-centered, or by obsessing about his or her career, for that matter. Do you think great entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Andy Grove, or Michael Dell were thinking of themselves or their careers when they were building their companies?

I'll tell you what I agonized over during the 20-something years I worked in corporate America: Meeting my goals. Exceeding my customer's expectations. Pulling off a wildly successful product launch with a fraction of my competitor's budget.

Sure, I sometimes complained about my a**hole boss, but I spent more time trying to figure out how to complement his weaknesses so we could all be successful. Of course, when I got fired or laid off, then I worried about finding a job. But otherwise, I focused on how to be the best at what I was paid to do. Period.

Look, don't get me wrong. We all need time to blow off steam. God knows, I do plenty of that. And who am I to judge how and where you get your online entertainment? It's just that, when you look at all the rhetoric out there in the blogosphere, you're likely to get the wrong impression about what really matters in the real business world.

What really matters in business ... is business. And the closer you get to impacting the business - where the rubber meets the road - the more visible you'll become, the more opportunities will arise, and the more successful you'll be. Simple as that.

Also check out:

Image CC 2.0 via Flickr