Humility over hubris

I’m a problem solver, I can’t help it. If there is a situation in need of attention, a hurdle to clear, or a puzzle to solve, my brain will work on it. I cannot turn this off. I have learned not everyone is wired this way, and when I run up against folks who are willing to just accept a situation for what it is, it actually causes my problem solving brain to work even harder.

Here’s the funny thing… those who are not natural problem solvers, seem to have a real problem with those of us who are.

Several years ago I was the head of sales and marketing for a manufacturing company. After several years of substantial growth, we decided to move from a 40,000 sq ft facility, to one with more than 80,000 sq ft of usable space. Moving a company of this size and complexity is no small task. It took us a year to find the right location and another year to plan and execute the move.

Moving is expensive, and often you need to make trade-offs. One of the things we decided to do was some phone system upgrades. When we got the new system installed, we got some bad news… the new phones were not compatible with our overhead paging system. We had the amplifiers and the speakers, but we needed an $1,800 component to tie it all together.?

Overhead paging was critical in our old building, and with the new building being twice the size, there was nearly universal agreement we could not operate without it. The owners however decided they’d had enough. They were done with cost overruns and surprise charges, and they decided to draw the line… just this side of the $1,800.

I suggested, there might be a less expensive way to solve the problem, but my contribution was met with a swift rebuke about how I just needed to accept the situation for now. Perhaps the president forgot I had spent the early part of my career in the professional audio industry, or, more than likely, he just didn’t want the problem solved.

My brain started spinning!

We moved, we started operating, and the lack of overhead paging was a real problem. People were hard to reach, information was hard to get, and I ended up walking several miles a day to accomplish what used to take just moments using overhead pages.

One afternoon I had an idea, and after securing a broken phone from our IT guy, I stopped by Radio Shack on my drive home. I spent $12 on some parts, and after my kids went to bed, I married the purchased components to the broken phone.

The next morning I brought my “franken-phone” creation to work, connected it up and voila, we had overhead paging again. The nay-saying boss never mentioned it.

The lesson here is simple, humility over hubris will always win the day, or as the image above says… be humble, you could be wrong.