Of course, I mean the theater of business! In past blog posts, we talked about the importance of being enthusiastic and educational to potential customers/clients.
This can carry on in to the dynamic theater of business, or play-acting in business; overly dramatic rather than overtly drama.
A splendid book I'm reading, Authenticity by James H. Gilmore and B. Joseph Pine II, tackles the four principles of acting at work:
- Play: Recognizing that it's about being on stage and thereby bringing fun to the process; work shouldn't be drudgery.
- Make Their Day: Customers are the audience of the performance, and one must focus on them and their needs.
- Be There: A standard acting technique, "be there in the moment," is about forgetting all else and focusing on the moment, being with this person.
- Choose Your Attitude: Acting is fundamentally about making choices, choosing what parts of ourselves to portray at this moment in time.
A great example of this is the World Famous Pike Place Fish Market in Seattle, which was showcased in the book.
They explained, "[e]mployees go through a number of street theater routines each day as the crowd slowly turns over, but the signature moment happens only when someone makes a purchase." Then begins an act of transferring the purchased fish around the market with pizzazz and gravity defying throws, until it's packaged and handled over to the customer.
Even if you have something as boring as buying fish, all you need is the theater of being remarkable and interesting to set yourself apart and to establish an audience!
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