Refers to products or services not in the Work, usually because the client is retaining it, or another contractor is responsible for it.
Useful primarily for identifying products and services that you might reasonably have assumed would be part of this Work, based on industry norms. Knowing you don’t have to do it allows you to reduce your price; conversely, not realizing something is out of scope drives your price up, making you less competitive.
See scope of work and scope creep.
Ready for the one genius tip
that will make you a better winter driver?
Here it is:
Look where you want to go.
This Popular Mechanics article goes on to explain why we drive into the very thing we want to avoid: the thing we’re staring at. Apparently this phenomenon even has a name: target fixation.
The road tests to get your motorcycle license in the United States requires that you make tight, low-speed turns without touching your foot on the ground. In my group, the people who passed this portion of the test did what the instructors said: point your chin in the desired direction, and look a couple seconds into the future. The students who watched their front wheel and tried to avoid the closest cone didn’t pass.
In Proposal Land, keep your focus on the deadline. Look a few days or weeks or months into the future instead of the few seconds that applies in cars and motorcycles, and you will automatically adjust your standards, expectations, and priorities so that you make it. Well, maybe not quite automatically, but at least you won’t be staring at the snake/pit/snake-pit at your feet.
Leadership is a choice: It’s such an odd thing to say.
The benefit of the doubt is withheld from many of us, options are unevenly distributed, and indoctrination is real.
And yet… no matter where we begin, we each get the choice, every day, to choose to lead.
Today Seth is selling courses as well as making a valid point: We can all lead.
It’s tragic that the brainwashing runs so deep that we’ve hidden that choice from many people. But it’s there, in areas big and small.
The world is changing faster than it ever has before, and we can choose to lead those changes or simply follow them.
In Proposal Land, we can choose:
Or we can choose to follow the existing path in our organizations, whatever it is.
We can all lead. By example if not by fiat. No matter where we begin.
Seth has a nice post on the point of maximum leverage, where he argues that we often put time and attention on things that don’t give us the best bang for our buck.
We can’t fix this problem until we see it,
and then we need to be clear with ourselves
and with our colleagues about where that leverage point is.
In Proposal Land, this happens all the time. Doing the high-return, maximum-leverage work is hard, you know? So we drift into doing what we can: Something easier. No one is immune, not even executives.
The great novel by the great Nevil Shute? Not this time. A great blog post by the great Seth Godin.
To get a new job, you’ll need to leave the old job behind.
Often, we try to pretend that growth comes with no goodbyes, but it does.
Perhaps we can go in with our eyes open, understanding that what we begin will likely end.
And when we plan for it, we’ll do it better.
And this great post about a mid-life/mid-career crisis. By, well, me, great or not. Hey, sometimes it comes together.
What I saw clearly, though, for the first time, was that my work output—as important as it was to my bosses, my compensation, and my sense of self—was not what would last. No matter how my career went, after I retired no one would care about the documents I had contributed to, or the processes I had established. Then as now, what would last was the people and what we meant to each other: the challenges we overcame, the fun we had, the things we taught each other, professionally and personally . . .
Sometimes, proposal careers are limited by company policy; sometimes (more often I expect) by personal capacity/exhaustion. In either case, Seth’s question is a good one:
What will you leave behind?