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When you want to improve people’s performance when you delegate to them

“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse.”

Henry Ford

I love this quote. It makes me smile. And it also makes a great point:

As long as the expert (Henry Ford) knows the beneficiary’s (customer’s) desired future (to go faster), then the expert can apply his skills to help achieve it.

In fact, the expert is bound to know more about how they can help than the bene­ficiary ever could, because they’re the expert. This is one of the reasons Steve Jobs didn’t believe in customer research, saying that it was Apple’s job to know what customers wanted before they did.

This concept has big implications when you’re delegating (in other words, when you’re ...

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