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Freedom Motivates – People

July 7, 2010 By Dee Gardner Leave a Comment

Every time I hear the word freedom I remember that point in Braveheart, right before William Wallace is about to be pulled apart by horses, when he yells “FREEDOM”  So we all know William Wallace was motivated by freedom, and was willing to die for it.

The question we all need to be asking is; Am I willing to fight and die for freedom.

Too often we give up our freedom to get something temporary.  If I want a car I get into debt, (slavery if it’s more than I can afford),  We become indentured servants to the bank to be able to drive the car.  Think about the credit score.  What it really indicates is how available we are to give up our freedom.

There are numerous examples of how we are giving up our freedom.  Take a moment now and think….  What freedoms  are you giving up?  What are you getting in return for giving up that freedom.

You have to be careful with this excersize.   You and I must decide if what you are giving up your freedom for is better than being free.  For instance.  I am married.  I gave up  some freedom to be married.  However, I would have never know the happiness I know now if I were not married and didn’t have kids.  I gave up some freedom to get a ton of happiness.  To me well worth the sacrifice.

I give up some of my freedom to have a career, However I am extremely more motivated to get a good job and provide for my family than if I had been single.  I am also motivated to minimize the time I spend working and maximize the value I bring to clients.  Because this maximize my freedom to spend time with my family.

We all need to think this question as we make decisions; Is this going to maximize my freedom? Is this going to maximize my happiness?  We need to experiment with this?  One way too is to ask other people if they have made similar decisions and what was their outcome.

We all should be yelling freedom everyday, at work, at home and when we are anywhere else.  Freedom.. Liberty.. Agency ..Autonomy All tell us about what we need to be fighting for.

If businesses are trying to better motivate their employees they should try a little freedom.

Below is a video about how companies giving there people more freedom/autonomy can add to greater productivity.

Filed Under: Advice, Innovation Tagged With: , , , ,

Freedom Beats China by Accident

September 27, 2009 By Dee Gardner Leave a Comment

Another anecdotal story about Owner thinking.

Running around, like chickens sans a head, two partners had started a company. They were spending 12-14 hours a day just to get a few orders out the door. They had a bunch of employees and One employee did nothing but try and keep track of the orders. And they were just barley scraping by making about $20,000 a month. If a customer had a problem, they didn’t get help and became a lost customer.

Step in the web guy/ savior / accidental implementer of Owner Thinking. The partners originally contacted him for just a little help with some simple functionality for customers to be able to submit requests for work to their website.

The Web Designer/programmer also did another thing that most technical people don’t do. He went to the company and worked in their facility for a few days to see what their processes were.
He presented them with a plan to be create a work flow system using the web. It took a couple of months but he built a system that would receive the request for an order. and then track it through the production process. He also created a queue to handle problems.
All of the production was done on a computer. A customer, from any where in the world, would send a picture that the to company to convert into a program that would be used by embroidery machines to stitch the picture onto fabric.

The second key to success and was the owners had been paying the employees per design to produce the artwork. This is a key to getting the employees to think like owners.
The employees realized the more work they did the more money they made. They also realized if the design came back, because of quality issues, they would have to fix it for free. Because of this they did things right the first time. They were thinking and acting just like the owner would. This coupled with the new work flow system ignited a firestorm of new business.

In just 6 short months they had gone from $20,000 a month to over $90,000. The owners were no long involved in the production and could focus on promoting their business. They had also reduced the amount of production employees by more than half. I think it was from 10 people to 4 people.

One of the other effects was that this company started being able to compete with China for orders. They were doing the work faster, better and at less of a cost to the customer.

How can this be? Because the employees were free to think like owners.

You pay an employee an hourly wage or a salary to create a slave. You give a person the freedom to create, innovate and control their own destiny you create a loyal patriot. A patriot that will work extremely hard for that freedom.

Filed Under: Innovation, Owner Thinking Tagged With: , , , , , ,