Financial Fractals.

Now, I don’t know much about fractals. I remember they are like an ever repeating pattern – no matter what size, always the same. Like a fern frond. Which I remember vividly from my wonderful childhood and liberty allowing Mom (by that I mean, I could do whatever I wanted as a child – as long as no one got hurt. I’ll be ever thankful for that).

It just struck me last week that one of the crazy things about employment, the search for, the intent for promotion and most importantly the responses, requirements and questions from recruiters (with whom I’ve been dealing with for a project right now) is the questions they ask – one one in particular…

And that is, the question they all seem to ask of people who’ve run agencies, which is ‘what’s the revenue, how big was the business you managed’. Now, if you’re going for an account handling role – and you want to demonstrate the scale of work you can undertake, or the amount of clients you can ‘liaise’ with on a daily basis (although in most of my experiences running an agency the world liaise normally means ‘I left a message on his/her voicemail’) then maybe it is relevant, although I don’t really believe it.

Was Obama discriminated against because he’d never held a nation’s budget before? Did Tony Blair get asked ‘well do you have experience of a multi-billion pound defence budget’. The answer is no. It’s about fractals – scale, if you can manage 100 dollars effectively then maybe you could manage 100′000 as well? The fundamentals, the rules of economics (and I’m learning more about THOSE every day) stay the same. The numbers change, but not the formulas.

Good leadership isn’t the volume or value of your business, it’s the quality, wisdom, decisiveness and passion of your leadership. The former is only a by-product of the latter.