The key to getting records to work in any organisation

Is spending a lot of time thinking about what other people want.

The real key to success in anything in any organisation, is the mandate to do it - the necessary authority and power that means you can do what you need to do.

Sometimes when you come into an organisation, the organisation just gives it to you - and then the only things you really have to think about are how much money you can get, how fast people can change, and how fast you can overcome the technical challenges (build systems etc).

Most of the time however, it's not that simple.

Most of the time, organisations bring us in under a mandate that can best be described as "flimsy" - in which we're not given the resources we need, not given the authority that will just let us do the work, not supported with the relationships that will help lubricate the process and in which our work is at best seen as 11th priority or worse (ie. the second page of google results).

Simply, this means that the question shifts from "what do I need to do" to "how do I achieve an organisational mandate to achieve the things I need to do."

The key to achieving that is spending a lot of time thinking about what other people want, what you can deliver and what you want.

In the middle of that venn diagram is your mandate.

Many years ago I remember someone expressing this far more elegantly than me, I think it was Zig Ziglar who used to say that "you can have anything you want in this life if you're prepared to help enough people get what they want."