You must be dreaming!

Today’s economy is GREAT!

     Dear business owners and managers:  If you’ve been talking about having some weirdo notion that we are in a never-ending economic tailspin that’s ruining the odds for  success, you may not be speaking with forked tongue, but you are looking through crooked glasses! 

     If  your business is still afloat,  that means you have done some hard sweeping work getting the cobwebs out of the corners. It means you are down to a bare-bones personnel operation that is probably 50-100% more productive than it was before “bailouts” and “stimulus” became part of the language.

     And you are coming full circle around  to what Tom Peters and Nancy Austin told us a quarter of a century ago in their classic #1 best-selling business book, A Passion for Excellence:

In the private or public sector, in big business or small, we observe that there are only two ways to create and sustain superior performance over the long haul:

“First, take exceptional care of your customer (for chicken, jet engines, education, healthcare, or baseball) via superior service and superior quality. Second, constantly innovate. That’s it.”

They add that “sound financial controls” and “solid planning” are of course also essential and necessary,” but that the bottom line of achieving success is to manage by wandering around —

• By constantly talking with your people,
• By constantly and attentively listening to their ideas, and
• By motivating through examples of the ways you cater to customers and work nonstop at innovation: always drumming up new creative ideas and strategically taking them all the way through in your thinking to a point of implementation.

Introducing a new product feature isn’t good enough. Anyone can think of that. Actually working out all of the steps involved with associated costs, benefits,  timelines, and logistics… that’s innovation! 

• By instilling a passion for customer courtesy and innovative thinking in every tiny corner of every department of the business, whether there are three employees involved, or 300,000. 

     Today’s economy sucks if you choose for it to.  If instead you seize the opportunity to be more motivated to deliver a better dollar-value quality product and service, quicker and safer, and that’s longer-lasting than ever before… and you pump all your company’s efforts into making your customers love you… NOW you’ve got something!

     And your leaner, tougher, more customer-conscious business  would never have happened when cash was flowing and you were on cruise control, lunching out and playing golf and taking off early and traveling the world on long vacations, and being so successful you were able to sell ice to Eskimos with one hand behind your back.

     Speaking of your hand:  The lousy economy, being continuously fueled by shortsighted (maybe even blind) government bureaucracy, has essentially forced your hand to act in new ways. And if in fact you do act in new more productive ways, then it’s a GREAT economy!

     Will you rise to the occasion  and make things work, or keep dreaming that they can’t,  throw in the towel, and get out of the way of those who are choosing to meet the challenge? 

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