What’s Your Mission Critical Core?
Years ago, when I served on the IT Executive team at Cisco, we partnered with Geoffrey Moore, author of Crossing the Chasm, to develop a module in our global Business Partnership program. The most critical take away was to never outsource our core business rules.
What he meant by that is that whatever is mission critical to our business should be at our core and never outsourced or out-tasked to an outside expert or body. In other words, never give away mission-critical activities to an outsider to manage because it is your unique claim to fame.
That is why we developed the business partnership program as one where the executive team delivered it globally. I got into a lot of hot water when I refused to hire an outside firm to train us. And I kept reminding everyone that our executives needed to be excellent business partners so the teams could not only see the leaders in action but understand the significance of mission-critical core.
Imagine for a minute if leaders didn’t delegate communication to a function but were having two-way conversations and listening was a regular practice. But that’s not the reality in many cases as functions are doing a huge part of mission-critical activities of leaders. Many of us are living these great disconnects today.
Never Giving Away Our Core
As I went through my own transformation many years later, this timeless wisdom echoed into what it means to be a conscious leader and become aware that leadership is not outside ourselves. And I realized that we have always been taught to trust everyone else before trusting ourselves.
In many ways, we have been conditioned to outsource our own mission critical core to an authority figure or partner who not always could be trusted. And if we looked closely at what is core to us, we may be making much different choices around placing more and more trust in ourselves to navigate these transformational times.
Isn’t it time to understand what is core for our own lives and own our power? What can we insource that sparks our own fire?
Mary Oliver reminds us:
“it is a serious thing just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in this broken world.”