Have you ever thought about your personal value proposition which makes you as a person more interesting than the others in your competition for new projects? Work it out! It helps you spending time on sales activities with the highest chance to close a deal and at the end of the day the highest chance to increase your productivity:

• What is your customer aiming to achieve?
• Why does your customer need to act?
• What are the critical success factors for your customer?
• What is your solution?
• What are the benefits for your customer (measurable if possible)?
• And at the end: Why you and not anyone else?

If you don´t find a clear and transparent answer to one of this 6 questions – spend your time on more promising sales possibilities. It saves time and increases your efficency.

But what exactly is self-discipline? It’s one of the key attributes that characterizes a samurai – and hence, an additional contribution to our blog series. Steve Paulina defines self-discipline as “the ability to get yourself to take actions regardless of your emotional state.” It is needed to follow through on your intention. Willpower and self-discipline help us to choose our behaviour and reactions instead of being their slaves. It makes you feel more powerful and consequently, more happy and satisfied. Self-discipline becomes therefore a powerful “team-mate”.

Steve Paulina states that self-discipline consists of five pillars: Acceptance, Willpower, Hard Work, Industry and Persistence. To better remember the five pillars, take the first letters of each word and you get the acronym “A WHIP” – a nice way to keep it in mind as it can be associated with whipping yourselve into shape.

Acceptance means that “you perceive reality accurately and consciously acknowledge what you perceive.” Willpower stands for the ability and strenght to put a course of actions into practice. The great challenge hereby is hard work. Whatever goal you want to achieve, you can get there if you’re willing to work. The term industry stands for time investment. Persistence also plays an important role in connection with self-discipline. It is defined as “the ability to maintain actions regardless of your feeling”. Even though you might feel like giving up on a project because it seems to be infeasible at first sight, nevertheless you will keep on going in order to reach your goal.

Holding self-discipline is not easy, it requires a lot of strenghts and time as well. One way to develop and improve these abilities is to practice doing things in your daily business activities that you do not like to do. By doing so, you can overcome your subconcious resistance, train your abilities and gain inner strength. Take actions that are necessary right away – even though they might not be a pleasure – and do not postpone it till later. With a certain degree of self-discipline, you will accomplish your goals and hence, succeed in business.

So, the next time you face a challenging task – just think about the “A WHIP” formula before postponing it.

Just think about it for a minute while reading this article and you will find out that there are a lot of similarities between the samurai of ancient Japan and today’s business professionals. Both, the samurai and the professional, are employed or hired because of their personal attributes: their professionalism, their skills and their reputation. It is all about the professional. Their values are not based on external resources, on man power, infrastructure or even money, but just on themselves. Thus, their value can not be observed upfront, but needs to be trusted upon.

However, the value of a samurai or a professional can be judged by looking at the past. Here, results and behaviour are the relevant metrics. While most people pretend to only look at results, behaviour is at least as important. Take an engineer, for example, who is designing an innovative product for a company. If he then turns around and is developing a similar product for a competitor (assuming he is not acting illegally), people will notice. If he does it again, people might become hesitant to involve him in critical situation. One could construct numerous examples where professionals are not only measured by actual results, but also by their behaviour while achieving these results and by their behaviour towards their customers, partners or colleagues.

Here, the need for a business codex comes into play. We believe that such a business codex could draw a lot by having a closer look at the codex of the samurai.

The samurai (business) codex – you might probably ask yourself – what is it? It is a special code of conduct, also known as “Bushido”, that consists of moral principles. Bushido was the guiding philosophy of the samurai regulating their way of life. It is an unwritten code that was passed on among samurai from one generation to another. The samurai codex consists of several key attributes. Those are, for example, loyalty, courage, respect, honour, and self-discipline – just to mention a few.

Loyalty

Let’s take one of those attributes, for example loyalty, and have a closer look at it. What does loyalty mean? Especially in today’s business context? Drawing the analogy to the samurai, the question raises: is it possible in today’s business world to be loyal?

Trying to find an answer to this question, it is necessary to define the term ‘loyalty’. Loyalty stands for faithfulness and involves the adherence of agreements that have been set. The samurai of ancient Japan were once loyal to their master and it was a question of honour to fight for their country and protect it against enemies. They were bound and subordinate to their master serving them till death. This already shows a high degree of loyalty and indicates that loyalty has been very important to the samurai.

On closer examination, parallels to today’s business world can be noticed. In today’s business world, loyalty demands truthfulness and fairness in dealing with supervisors, colleagues, employees and partners. Although we do not have a master anymore like the samurai once had, loyalty to a company can be strong too. Going abroad for business reasons and moving from country to country also represents a certain degree of loyalty of the employee to his company. It is a great challenge, but if you want to be successful, you take this opportunity.

In the business world, we do not “fight” for our country but for our company. And of course, we do not fight physically, but rather with convincing arguments, knowledge and experience as well as brands and new innovations. As complexity in companies grow, people have shifted their loyalty to individuals rather than corporations. Focusing on the individual, it is easier to be loyal to because you can build up trust and hence, strong business relationships. Being loyal to individual persons also involves the risk that by changing the job, they often take clients with them.

By looking at the samurai’s way of living and acting, we can learn a lot from them. Due to the similarities, we are able to apply those principles also in today’s modern business environment and hence, benefit from it.

A full calendar, tight schedules and deadlines as well as a high work load are typical characteristics of professionals who work on parallel projects with different customers. Due to their expertise and long experiences in specific areas, professionals have a strong competitive advantage compared to others. Every day, they face the challenges of the modern business world and have to demonstrate their expertise to prevail among competitors.

We believe that knowledge alone is not enough to stay competitive and be successful in the market in the long run. It is also the spirit and the attitude that makes the difference.

Why? Today’s professionals have the skills and knowledge, but this alone is not enough. They also need to win the trust of their customers to win new business.

In our highly complex world, it is getting increasingly difficult for a customer to properly judge the work of a highly skilled professionals. Whether it is IT architecture or market research: an in-depth evaluation of the work would usually require to repeat the work. Therefore, a customer need to trust a professional that he will get the proper advice or the best solution. “Trust” is the key word here. Not only trust in the professionalism and skills, but also trust in the person that he will do his best to serve the customer.

Like the Samurai of ancient Japan, it was not just their skills that made them famous, but also their “Bushido”, their ethics and spirit. Professionals could learn a thing or two by studying the way of the Samurai…