Alanon Waken C

Dream No Small Dreams-If you’re committed to going out there and pursuing a dream, make sure the dream is worthy of your time and attention. Seek the game worth playing. If your current life doesn’t have a dream big enough to risk the game, then find one that does. Find a dream so juicy, so appealing, and so powerful that it compels you to work to reach it. It calls to you, sings to you, sinks its hooks into you and won’t let you go. What’s a dream that is so powerful that you will live part of your life for it?

In the next few chapters, we’re going to look at how to rediscover the dreams you’ve had and then supersize them in Maui fashion to create something even bigger and bolder. We believe that you were born to do something great, and now it’s time to rediscover exactly what that greatness is!

Dream Big!-Corporations pay thousands of dollars to work on articulating their company vision. The corporate vision generally isn’t just about making money. It’s about the deeper reasons why the business exists and the powerful passions that fuel the organization.

The same is true for us. You have a personal vision as well. Sadly most of us don’t bother to take the time and energy necessary to articulate our own vision — the dreams that make everything we do worthwhile. Without a dream to pursue, our spirit wilts and our soul shrinks.

Your big dream is your personal vision that taps into the passion you have in your life. Passion is the energy of your heart. It drives you to perform at the highest possible level. It gives you the fuel to keep going when others around you quit. Passion dares you to ask more, to do more, to be more. Passion allows you to make mistakes, get knocked down, and get up for another round. Passion is the limitless energy that allows you to achieve extraordinary results. It’s the juice that makes life so sweet.

What is so important to you that you would invest part of your life going after it without any direct reward or compensation, just because you felt so powerfully moved by that dream? That’s a first step in determining the dreams that aren’t just merely financial. If your most compelling desire right now is to create a certain amount of money or passive cash flow, ask yourself — why? Imagine you have all the money and financial success you’ve ever wanted, then what? When you achieve that level of wealth, what are you going to do with the money? Who is the person you dream of being? That’s how you can tap into the most compelling aspect to those dreams.

From just-in-time to just in case. In the struggle to maintain vital supply chains after September 11, not every company fared as well as Sears, Ford Motor closed five North American plants when engines and drive trains failed to arrive from Canada. Electronics manufacturer Solectron chartered a plane to transport components to Ireland from California. And General Motors delayed production of 10,000 cars and trucks when the company couldn’t get parts.

Because of the uncertainty created by terrorist threats, some experts expect to see a shift away from the tightly choreographed world of just-in-time logistics, where factories, suppliers, and purchasers use information technology to reduce inventory overhead. “We’ll see more inventory padding throughout the supply chain,” predicts Jennifer Chew, an analyst at Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. Just-in-time is undergoing a reexamination, giving way to systems that can accommodate greater flexibility and redundancy.

Kathy Dobie, an associate professor of business at North Carolina A&T State University and Author of the paper “Terrorism and the Global Supply Chain,” thinks companies will need to plan for extra costs related to supply-chain security. “I don’t think anyone  can afford to build all-new systems,” she says. “But as companies develop new strategies and suppliers, they’ll look at them with security in mind.”

Although sophisticated information technology systems ushered in the just-in-time world, companies that managed September 11 most effectively credit their sucess to old-fashioned virtues such as good person-to-person communication, rigorous training, and preexisting contingency plans. What was true before the attacks is abundantly so in their wake: It’s not now-and never was-just about technology.