He was so ready
But at a dead stop until
He gave something more…
I met him after.
By then, he had been promoted and put in charge of major new initiatives, a trusted advisor to the president of his company. An adequate dresser in suit and tie, but a wrinkled shirt that never stayed properly tucked and unruly hair, he did not match the other blue suits in the executive suite.
However, he was respected within his company, celebrated in the press and outside world, because he was the only one who dug when it was time to dig. In his before, he was stuck in place, a smart-enough hard worker who might one day advance up another level or two, but never to senior management, certainly never to the inner circle.
In that before, knowing himself doomed and shunted aside in favor of more attractive, shinier, and brighter alternatives, he did the work that no one else would do or even thought to do. He reviewed years of market research, stacks of consumer studies, and every piece of market intelligence the company had gathered methodically and forgotten all about. While he didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, he did know what he needed to find: something his company knew once, but hadn’t yet capitalized upon in the marketplace.
After days, weeks, months of painstaking, mind-numbing effort at the end of frenetic work days, he found it. In the middle of a long, boring research document, a company scientist tossed down a stunning fact framed with an offhand comment that everyone knew this.
No, they didn’t.
Or, if they had, no one knew it now.
And now was all that mattered.
He figured out a way to leverage that fact into emphatic, market-changing reality. In his characteristically blunt, earnest way, he sold the idea to his boss and then his boss’ boss, all the way up to top management. No doubt his passion, the well-considered plans, convinced management to invest in the idea and then to ride it to remarkable, profitable success.
He’d changed his value proposition and tilted the playing field in his favor. His idea and its implementation catapulted the company to unexpected market eminence. Having been the only one who unearthed hidden treasure and championed it through development and launch, he was promoted repeatedly to the fine office where he sat that day, exploding prior expectations and his former stalled career.
His suit was expensive, but still rumpled and shirt still not tucked in right. But now, in the after, he was in his rightful place, a true creative thinker and visionary with badly scuffed shoes. He described his single-minded search for what his organization knew but hadn’t taken seriously.
Part of the joy in the after was showing others the way to know what you know — then do something with it. Another part is sharing the story.
Louise Foerster 