Influencing Powerful People – Thought Post #5

For a month now, Rick Baker, a longtime CFFB member and board member has been writing short thought posts sharing quotes from Dirk Schlimm, who will be CFFB‘s special guest and keynote speaker on April 26th.

For more information about this event and to register, please click here.

This week’s quote from Dirk’s book:

“And the fact is that powerful people are often desirous and capable of a large spectrum of contribution; they are not just a “genius”, but a genius universalis.”

So, the powerful people Dirk is talking about are universal geniuses…geniuses with broad and deep capabilities.

Over the years, I have written about such people. Here are a couple of examples, which shed light on the value we will obtain when we understand the wisdom Dirk will share with us on April 26th:

• Entrepreneurs have an innate talent: moving back and forth between narrow and wide focus, identifying opportunities and digging deeply.  This thought post talks about the rare gift of seeing the big/strategic picture and specific details of how to address opportunities and problems at the same time. This rare gift is possessed by all successful entrepreneurs.

• When we see these gifted entrepreneurs/powerful people in action, we have choices on how we interact with them. For example, we can accept their unique strengths and choose to help them. Or, we can criticize their shortcomings and choose to undermine their efforts and even fight them. I favour understanding powerful people’s strengths and complementing their strengths with our strengths. To accomplish this, we must control the ‘littlenesses in our natures‘. Here’s a thought post with more details – Controlling the common littlenesses of human nature.