Lion Templin
AUTHOR

Lion Templin

Business & Careers
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“Does what it says on the tin.” There’s a segment of the work population that doesn’t fit in. We build our careers along a path of our own making, leaving the comforting structures of linear progression to others. We are independents, contractors, consultants. What we lack in proscribed path, we make up for in diversity of experience. We have, given enough time, seen it all. Resumes and CVs become unrecognizable as the choices we make become less understandable by people who climb a single ladder. Most may not understand us, but we know who we are. My career started as an independent consultant. Consultants, good ones, apply a harshly critical eye and an outside perspective to a business. There are points in time that every company desperately needs this, and then needs to kill the messenger. Such is consulting. I grew up in the wilderness. You have to pay attention in the deep forests of North America. It’s a world that will not be troubled to kill you for a careless mistake. Paying attention is key, and that attention is to the details as well as the big picture. Seasons, like winter, come like clockwork; storms come at any moment. I was a guide in that wilderness. It is no small thing to lead an inexperienced team through that wild; the consequences are just as dire, the team’s knowledge far less. That was the point: a journey of a lifetime, something they’d never forget because it wasn’t easy. If it was easy, everyone would do it. Kind of like my career. Only a few years after I began my career did I start down the road to turn-around consulting. This is a rarified type that drops me right in the middle of companies in trouble. I saved projects from last-minute failure. I saved failed products from destroying whole businesses. I saved businesses from horrific people. It’s usually the people that cause the most damage. I lost companies too, more than I saved. By the time they get to me it is often too late. I still have to try. That’s what I’m paid to do. Still pushing the envelope, I joined up to be a search and rescue pilot. The world takes on a new intensity when you’re flying at 100 mph at 500 feet up, dodging hills and antenna towers in a desperate mission to find someone clinging to life. I keep quiet around the families as they wait outside the hanger for their loved ones to be found, I just fly the plane. In all of this I pay attention to the details and the big picture. I watch for patterns, the shortcuts of everyday life that nature – and people – take time and time again. They’re out there, those patterns are present in the wilderness, in the office, in societies, in individuals. And what that means is that I can predict what comes next. My name is Lion. I do what it says on the tin.
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