SOMEHOW I MANAGE. dot. dot. dot. How To Inspire?— by Robert California

RET2082 [Roy Tertman]

4 min readNov 4, 2019

Welcome back.
Here’s what you missed: Somehow I Manage. dot. dot. dot. — by Robert California

Recap:
When I started the SOMEHOW I MANAGE series it was because Michael Scott really influenced me in my career and in the business world and at times, my personal life. I wanted to capture those thoughts in writing.
This time around i wanted to focus on another business character that REALLY affected my views and guiding philosophies both in the business world and in life.

As in my original post that started this series (which i am turning into a book soon), i will review the character arc of Mr. California chronologically as it was portrayed to us — the viewers, while offering additional perspectives and connecting it all to my and our lives.

Somehow I Manage. All rights reserved. ©2019. by RET2082 [Roy Tertman]

Episode 2 — The Incentive.

This episode is about 2 things. Numbers and Inspiration.
Andy, the regional manager needs to double his numbers (revenue targets) by the end of the quarter.

We all do, hell i would love to commit now that i will double my revenues by the end of the quarter, if only it was that easy. But it can be easy, one you have the right motiction, and this is probably the biggest business (and life) lesson i've’ learned from Robert California.

Ask yourself now:

“Can you inspire? Do you have that skill set?”

The Inspiration Skill Set.

Robert’s inspiration was a tough one, to a dying paper industry.
Essentially what Robert told them is that in today’s consumerisms we have options:

I know what I want — Go online, search and buy.
I don’t know what I want — Go to a store that can help me.

The era of personal service is back. Mark it down people — Robert said it.
Maybe this is a result of the Retail Apocalypse.

Andy’s First Try.

Naturally the logical business method to get your revenues doubles as stipulated by Jim are 1) get new leads, 2) enter a new territory 3) an “in” with a new client. Ok, that's not good enough as like in nature, nothing is created from nothing. So how to inspire and how to create something out of nothing???

The Incentive.

A basic reward system (minus the vibrator 😜).
You do your job better, you get reward.

simple, right? Let’s make it interesting.

Jim hacked the incentive by pulling all the points by all the employees in the office to combine them to one huge reward. This made Andy agreeing to get tattooed whatever the office choose if they get to accumulated rewards goal — 5000 points.

And they did. “Took ’em one day”

5000 points to get Andy to tattoo his butt

Why Did Robert Pick Andy?

I guess eventually Robert made Andy step out of his comfort zone and realize that there are many ways and methods to get what you want — from yourself and in the workplace. What really nailed it was the business ideas that Jim had (i reviewed the above) before which were used as the benchmark to what Andy should do, but instead he went a different way, and it yielded the desired result so i don't see any problem with that, we can all Double our efforts and our goals but we so rarely do, maybe its because we always use the same approach or thinks in the same patterns, or maybe it's because we don't have enough motivation — for which we need an Incentive?

What's your Incentive?

Recently i finished a great book — Atomic Habits by James Clear, and it states very simply and most of all, honestly, how we use incentives to motivate to de-motivate our behavior.

What Robert did was to create a new incentive which yielded new behavior. if Andy (or you) deemed that behaviour good, that he should find ways to use the incentive again and create a habit out of it. The incentive wasn't the rewards system Andy came up with — it was Robert’s pressure to get the best out of Andy, a great manager should do it, even its not the most orthodox ways 😎.

That’s it for this time, i’ll see you in the next one.
Cheers,
RT,
RET2082