By Kevin Byrne, founder of
Checkatrade.com I
f you look back at literature produced in the last century you’ll regularly come across topics such as honesty,
integrity,
SEEDS OF HONESTY
faithfulness,
dependence, reliability and service. Indeed, the whole of the 21st century has been built on these principals.
Before the internet revolution, if you undertook business with another, whether a small transaction at a local shop or an international deal, invariably you would meet who you were doing business with. Today this is diminishing at a rapid speed due to the internet. Now it seems anyone can start a business, hide behind messages on their web site or entice customers with appealing graphics and words that could just be a veneer.
The face-to-face, looking into one another’s eyes is gone and we are left with trying to decipher whether we buy often purely on a message. Today it seems a new fashion of rules apply, with some applying ethics such as positive mental attitude and lubricating the wheels of human interaction to get as much out of customers as possible. A few, dare I say it, even manipulate people mentally. My experience is as I meet and get to know the successful is they have and still operate by the same old-fashioned rules.
This reminds me of a story I read a while ago. A successful business man was growing old and knew it was time to choose a successor to take over the business. Instead of choosing one of his directors or children, he decided to do something different. He called all the young executives in his company
30 entrepreneurcountry
together. He said “It is time for me to step down and choose the next CEO. I have decided to choose one of you.”
The young executives were shocked, but the boss continued: “I am going to give each one of you a SEED today - one very special SEED. I want you to plant the seed, water it, and come back here one year from today with what you have grown from the seed I have given you. I will then judge the plants that you bring and the person who’s one I choose will be the next CEO.”
He told the young executives where he bought the seeds and what type of plant they were. One man, named John, was there that day and he like the others received a seed. He went home and excitedly told his wife the story. She helped him get a pot, soil
and compost and he planted the seed. Every day John would water it and watch to see if it had grown.
After about three weeks, some of the other executives began to talk about their seeds and the plants that were beginning to grow. John kept checking his seed, but nothing ever grew. Three weeks, four weeks, five weeks went by, still nothing. By now, others were talking about their plants, but Jim didn’t have a plant and he felt like a failure. Six months went by - still nothing in John’s pot. He just knew he had killed his seed. Everyone else had tall plants but he had nothing. John didn’t say anything to his colleagues, however... He just kept watering and fertilizing the soil - He so wanted the seed to grow.
A year finally went by and all the young
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