Hi! How are you? What’s new? How are things? OK yeah! That’s all great. Guess what though?
Everything you know about your business is about to change
If you are lucky and smart, then you are probably already aware of it. You have intelligence on the changes in your industry and you know all too well what doesn’t work in your business. You know where the soft underbelly of your business is. Maybe its keeping talented staff on board when paying good people to stick around means getting less for yourself? Maybe where once overseas producers helped you increase your profit margins but are now shifting their strategies by competing directly with you? Maybe your simply paralyzed by the amount of change you know you need. This last one is particularly common.
The 21st Century way of doing is business is here, and whether or not you are ready for it, if you are running a business, almost everything you know or any assumptions you’ve made along the way have to be recalibrated. It is shocking to me to see how many industries feel they are immune to this. How many 20th Century industries need to be disrupted until you realize that you are next?
I talk to business owners day in and day out. They all know they need to change, they can all sense that tinge in the air that tells them the paradigms are shifting. They want to do better. They want to move beyond spreadsheets and profits. They want to rebuild the relationship between themselves and their customers. And yet they just can’t. Can’t What?
They can’t plan, prepare, process
This is because everyone is stuck on stupid. All they want to do is go back to that wonderful time before the recession tsunami tumbled in and washed away their profits, the wealth and behavior of their customers and the rest of what they knew. The problem with this kind of thinking is that it presupposes that the Pre-Recessionary America is a place we want to go back to. But is it? Do we really only wish to a return to a time marked by ostentation, mindless consumption and financial utopianism? Or do we want to instead build something new and better? Don’t you want to build a business that can weather the financial dislocations of the future? When will the next one be? In 5 years? In 10?
What if it were tomorrow? What if tomorrow you woke up and your industry was rocked by a scandal. Or a new invention that streamlined your production? Or new governmental regulation? We like to believe that we can only handle so much unexpected unfairness. No one expected the recession to rock America (and indeed the world) in the way that it eventually did. So business owners expect things to just magically get better. Because they’ve already experienced the pain. They can’t possibly be in for anymore.
This is the kind of ego-centric that ends up destroying business once and for all. You are not immune. Your business is not immune. If you are in pain, prepare for more. Instead of believing yourself to be immune, and why not probe your immune system and figure out how to strengthen it?
Tomorrow, I am going to show you how thinking differently about your business, about competition, about planning, about sustainability, about technology, about staffing and about yourself can lead you to CREATE the world you want, not return to one that wasn’t working in the first place.
Image Source Courtesy of Waifer X on Flickr
