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Is your company entitled to more from you than the day’s work for which they pay?

The answer is a resounding yes. There’s an old saying that has stood me in very good stead in business: ‘Negotiate toughly, settle liberally’. It’s right that you hammer out the terms on which you are going to work. Everything is a negotiation from the moment you are sentient to the moment you die. The hard school of living teaches you that. It doesn’t teach you quite so easily when to stick and when to twist in the poker game of life. That you have to learn from others and from your own values. Here’s how you do it.

Imagine that the business for which you work is yours. What would you do to improve its performance? What new ideas would enhance the profits? Which products would you launch? What savings could you make? How would you motivate the workers better? What are the obvious future developments for the business? Can it be improved by devoting more attention to the Internet? Should it be looking overseas for new markets? Are there threatening competitors creeping up on the company? Is the technology getting out of date?

Can’t think of the things that would improve your business? Become an entrepreneur and apprach the question creatively. Use mind-mapping techniques to stimulate your inventiveness; pose outrageous suggestions about the company and see if you can persuade a reliable friend of their viability; note the new products or services coming onto the market and ask yourself ‘why couldn’t that be better’ and ‘why didn’t we do that’; question every aspect of the operations.

But it’s not your business, so why should you do all this?

Mistake! It is your business. You are working in it. You may not own the shares or the assets but you are a vital part of it, whatever your job. You should do everything you possibly can to make it successful, even beyond what you are paid to do. Looking at it as though it is yours will improve life in three ways for you.

First it will make you thoughtful; thoughtful people learn; people who learn get on. You will be equipping yourself for better jobs – and possibly to run your own business at some time.

Second, it will give you immense personal satisfaction. To think through what needs to be done is personally rewarding. It helps you to realise that making money is not as easy as you thought. It enables you to see the two sides to every possible development. That’s why I never did all the thinking in the business I built. Why should I grab all the satisfaction? Better to let others have some of it.

Third, you will be exercising your judgment. You need to do that because, like your body, your brain goes soft if you don’t stretch it. Just as a ghost portfolio helps you decide how to invest, so thinking about the future of the business for which you work helps you learn the critical points of business management.

Will anyone listen to your ideas? They will if you present them sensibly and rationally; they won’t if you are belligerent about them. You have to use all your emotional intelligence (EI) skills to get your ideas understood and accepted. That’s a challenge in itself. The rewards are high. Do it right and you will become invaluable to the boss. Invaluable people earn more, get more promotion.

Pie in the sky? When did you try it? Tell me it doesn’t work when you’ve had a go.

Go on – surprise me.