If it was good enough for Captain Kirk, it’s good enough for business people.
When the crew of the Enterprise boldly went where no one had gone before, they were bound by the Prime Directive.
This was a guiding principle of Starfleet that prohibited its members from interfering with the natural development of alien civilizations.
Business may not have to deal with Klingons or Romulans or Tribbles or even Ricardo Montalban looking to take over your ship.
However, business people do face all kinds of problems and sometimes must react at warp speed.
The billionaire philanthropist Manoj Bhargava says businesses can’t afford aggravation. (Photo by Saumya Khandelwal/Hindustan Times via Getty Images)
Hindustan Times/Getty Images
Billionaire: we’re all in a rowboat
Manoj Bhargava has his own version of the Prime Directive.
The billionaire philanthropist and corporate executive, who founded 5-hour Energy drinks, shared his views on this concept on his recently launched podcast The Business of Everything.
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It all comes down to two words: no aggravation.
“Whether you’re an employee, a customer, a vendor, whoever you are,” he said. “If you aggravate me, if you aggravate us, you’re out. I don’t care who you are.”
That may sound shocking, but Bhargava, like Mr. Spock, sees only logic in his approach.
“People go, ‘well, I can’t do that,'” he said. “Customers can aggravate you all the time. It’s not true, not true at all. What I’ve found is that anything that aggravates you takes up 90% of your head and it’s usually 2% of the usefulness. So, I said ‘get rid of that.'”
Bhargava, majority owner of TheStreet’s parent, The Arena Group (AREN) , says business people are all in the same boat.
“We’re all in a rowboat,” he said. “We’re all rowing in the same direction. If somebody is not rowing or rowing in a backwards direction, they need to get out of the boat because we all need to move forward.”
“That’s kind of what aggravation is like, too,” he added. “You’re getting rid of the aggravation so you can all move forward.”
This will free up your most important asset: your head and the heads of your senior staff.
Bhargava stresses importance of usefulness
Angel Burgos, executive director of graduate programs at Florida International University College of Business, had a similar point view, noting that “not all partnerships are destined to succeed.”
“Make sure that the values of the clients align with the values of the organization,” he said. “It is exactly what I say to students when selecting a graduate program. Make sure the environment is a fit with your expectations. Don’t be afraid to move on.”
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Bhargava cited the words of the legendary consultant and author Peter Drucker, whom BusinessWeek dubbed “the man who invented management.”
“He was sort of the Mickey Mantle of business writing,” he said. “One of his sayings is ‘feed the opportunities, starve the problems.’ You have this little fire going on over here and everything is going towards that.”
“Meanwhile,” he explained, “there’s an opportunity to sell this huge customer or sell this great product or build this great product, and you’re paying 5% or 10% of your resources to that, and most of it’s going to the little problem.”
Bhargava notes that jettisoning these problems isn’t easy since the squeaky wheel does get the grease.
But beaming that noisy wheel out of your company’s life will give you the chance to go to where the real opportunities are.
In the end, it all comes down to what you can use.
“I’ll tell you how we work in our company,” Bhargava said. “So somebody comes to me with a project or something that needs to be done, the first question I ask is, ‘is it useful? How is it useful?’ And if it’s not useful, it had better be entertaining.”
“And, if it’s not useful or entertaining there’s only one other basket left,” he said, “And that’s useless.”
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