Be An Engineer In An Industry Full Of Lawyers

Don’t ask me why, but the other day at about 9 o’clock in the evening, I found myself fully invested in a Substack article about why China managed to build things so much quicker than every other country or economy.

For example, they built 45,000 km of high-speed rail in 10 years, and it took India more than 10 years to make its first bullet line of just 508 km

We see this in the USA, Canada, UK - You only have to look at HS2 to see how slowly we actually get moving on things in the UK

An author of a book on this topic says one of the most important distinctions between the US and China is that the US is a society run by lawyers and China is a society run by engineers.

So in a society of lawyers, you are incentivised to follow the process; in China’s engineering state, you are incentivised to deliver the product.

The local leaders in China are given a lot of freedom to experiment with as long as they reach the goals set for them in terms of production and development.

Deng Xiaoping let go of thousands of government officials who would have run things in a more lawyerly way, and encourage a competitive environment where cities and provinces vie to demonstrate how effective their specific development model was.

This allowed political competition. If your methods were and models were the best, you were promoted as a leader, and promotions were tied to GDP growth targets, etc.

So when multiple leaders are experimenting with various models, the best ones emerge and end up being adopted by everyone around them as well. The speed that China has is because of the institution, not by accident.

I think in the fitness industry we have spent too long focusing on process.

There are people who are obsessed with having lots of steps and lots of things you have to do in order to then earn the right to build more and do more stuff.

It’s a drawn-out process of improvement, normally also section by section. You might think about how you want to do your coaching program, then you might create an offer, then you might market it.

And then if you’ve got clients in, you get enough clients in until you start thinking about changes that you should make in order to improve it.

An engineer mindset with coaching would be moving as quickly as possible, testing, iterating, and seeing what models work best as fast as you can to then find yourself using feedback to quickly put together a collection of answers that would self-select as the best way for you to run the thing that you’re doing.

What interests me is that Chinese Top leadership at the time of them building a lot of their infrastructure were engineers.

They approached their societies as if it were a giant technical problem, something to be solved like a hydraulic system or a math equation.

And I really think there’s something to that for coaches.

Each business, once it’s done the basics of establishing what it’s for, who it’s for, how it’s delivered

It then becomes a huge maths equation where the component parts of the equation are made up of things like offer, pricing, customer experience, coaching experience, systems, marketing, and whatever else.

And the quicker you can be the person that builds those things, the quicker you get to the best model for your business.