Are we all hybrids now

This was written in response to a question that came up in my howtodobusiness club on ecademy. It was posed by Mark Wiggins who was asking the old technical salesman question in a different guise - can you combine analytic and hunter-killer skills in the same person.

This was my reply

If you are running a small company you need to be able to do everything - you need to be a visionary, a salesman, a team leader an analyst - you have to be able to do the numbers. In my work I use a tool called the brainmap which analyses how individuals think. (It was devised by Dudley Lynch, author of Strategy of the Dolphin who is one of my favourite business authors.

So much so that I distribute his products in the UK.



This Profile is typical of many small business owners who's profile is somewhat visionary but close enough to the centre to cover all the bases.

For companies operating in the networked economy, the ability to combine systems and people skills, and to integrate left brain and right brain activity is a key competency. It's necessary to deal with the complexity but this approach is probably only effective in the hunter gatherer space (ie under 10 employees) and where dealing with technology is part of the businesses stock in trade or where its necessary to develop a completely integrated business model for proof of concept purposes.

To go past this requires the kind of division of labour approach that Mike articulates. If you want to make some serious money out of a business ( and we know from the stats that only a small number of people actually do) then you need a team to drive the business up to the next threshold - 50 people and several million turnover in round figures - at which point you can cash out.

People who do that tend to take the "Big Picture" approach and outsource anything tedious.

People below the magic 10 barrier probably love integrating and aren't prepared to let go of that. So the business gets stuck. The moral is - if you're a creator get it into existence as a working model and flog it at that point. You won't want to do the growing to 50 stage as you're probably more interested in the what and the systems than you are in the people.

We could discuss all this in terms of Dudley Lynch's models or Mike Southon's or even Wealth Dynamics - they all have something to say on the subject.

However the reply is based on my own experience - I spent years stuck at that hunter gatherer stage because really I enjoyed the challenge of modelling the next business model too much

Very interested to hear other people's views and experiences