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What Mastery Can You Offer?
A wise person can distill down the essence of a business or a person’s mastery. Long ago, we created an exercise in my boutique hotel company, Joie de Vivre, in which we asked management theorist Peter Drucker’s favorite question, “What business are we in?” five times in sets of dyads (you sit two people facing each other). The value of this repeating question meant the answerer, who couldn’t repeat an answer, needed to act like a miner in digging deeper into what’s their core differentiator. This approach led us to discover...
...Joie de Vivre was in the “identity refreshment” business and Airbnb, where I repeated it years later, was in the “belong anywhere” business. This entirely changed the way both companies ran their business.
So, if we were to mine your mastery, what would we discover? Sit down with a friend and do this MEA exercise. Have your friend ask you the question, “What mastery do you offer?” (or make it “can you offer” if this is something new you will be offering the world in terms of your skills). You can’t answer the same way twice, so take your time and see what your intuition or consciousness dredges up. And, your witness (the questioner) is there purely as a mirror, not to help you with the answer, but to elicit more responses. The results have been amazing. We’ve heard all kinds of answers from, “I am a social alchemist who knows how to mix people for a catalytic effect” to “I am a wave spotter who can see the cultural set on the horizon, so we can surf it” to “I am a healer of broken dreams.”
Try the exercise today. Discover the essence of what you can offer the world.
