As millionaire Elmer J. Fudd would say “Shhhh, Be vewy, vewy quiet, I am hunting wabbits” (sic). For my Millennials Elmer was a character on the Saturday Warner Brothers Bugs Bunny/Road Runner show I watched as a kid. This Looney Tunes character had an odd manner of speech replacing his “R’s” and “L’s” with “W’s” along with a disproportionate sized bald head. I’d post you his picture, but there are these things called Copyright laws.
What I would like for you to do is be “vewy quiet” right now and answer the questions of the day “What is life? “What is it like?” Write down you’re response before reading further.
I have answered those same questions with a variety of metaphors during my orbits about the sun, e.g., “It is like the Ultimate Escape Room” requiring a team of people to figure out clues and riddles to make it from one room to the next and finally a joyous escape. Or “life is a battle, you fall out of a womb, crawl across hostile territory and into a grave”. Do you see the problem with my past global metaphors? One is filled with clues and riddles that one cannot achieve by oneself, leading to Failure or an escape and the other says it’s a life long battle resulting in death.
Coaching for me began in the late 1980’s. During coaching I worked full time while attaining both a Master’s and PhD degree (1995), I rose up to Management levels in my career, in 2008 to Director level and 2014 Vice President. 2016 President and CEO. Today life for me is not the Ultimate Escape Room, or a a lifelong avoidance of death. The last few years it has been more like a VOYAGE, sailing a Pirate Ship along a circuitous path on a treasure map to an “X marks the spot”. Along the way there have been islands with man eating cannibals (people who want to steal the technology for themselves), shark infested waters to swim through (big companies, competitors, unfair and one sided legal agreements), storms that blow you off course (the usual Murphy’s Law experiences when doing Research and Development). And even sometimes mutinous crew members (teenagers). And sometimes there has been absolutely glassy seas with a strong breeze filling my sails and moving me closer to the “X”. The X is short for an exit.
An enormous amount of Intellectual Property has been created which with teaming, licenses and funding will result in Products. It is time for a different Global Metaphor. It is time for a much larger Vision. Something without pirates and sharks, something not so laced with just surviving another day in battle, something like …. Please help me out here, I need a better metaphor. Do you?
