This column is called Leading Change and is written for people taking the reins in their hands, whether by choice or not. In organizations today it is often the latter.
Circumstances are not what we would like them to be. Profits are down. People are being laid off. Leadership is forever asking us to do more with less. We are in the process of systematically and persistently discovering what can be dispensed with and what is critical.
There are days when simply making it through without a catastrophe feels like an accomplishment.
How do you deal with change when imposed from outside, whether by leadership or an unfriendly environment? How do you screw your own head on differently so you are up to the task, and help others do the same? How do you move from stress to engagement? What opportunities are there in a mess like this?
I worked in a large, decentralized bureaucracy for thirteen years. This situation came around in some form or other every few years like the moon cycling around the planet, causing the tides to ebb and flow.
Those of us who were in it for the long haul recognized the cycles of stress and developed our particular ways of coping.
Some put their heads down and got to work, thinking the best way to avoid a layoff was to be busy generating real value, demonstrating our worth through actions. Mostly it worked. But, sometimes the axe came through without regard for rationality, common sense, or even political correctness.
It is a time of real stress, and that must be dealt with. Many turn to distractions that are less than healthy: drink more, smoke more, party more. That is a cycle that leads to personal health crises, eventually creating more problems than it resolves and even permanent damage.
Get support and make it the kind that works deep magic on your psyche. Spend more time with your children and close friends. Go to the gym more often, or take long walks. Get into music, painting, dance, poetry, theater. Turn toward your soul.
At work, look for the unique opportunities presented by stressful times. Believe it or not, once you get past the anxiety, there are real silver linings in these dark clouds, and a few can be cashed in personally. Here are some:
Innovate
When many are anxious or down, they are distracted and their energy is low. It is an excellent time to move forward with new ideas, to be seen as a champion. Almost everyone is trying to fade into the woodwork, and those who want to shine have ample opportunity. Standing out in the crowd can help your career in more ways than one.
Make Your Move
We are in a reshuffle in the marketplace. The same is true inside organizations. Those at the top are hauled off or disappear. Those at the margins move into the mainstream. Some who were barely known are suddenly major players. What’s your move? Now is the time.
Even if you do end up in the job market, why not go out in a blaze of glory? If departure is inevitable, now is the time to push through that radical idea you want to be known for. Then add it to your resume and include it as a given in your next job, which will be that much more interesting. And if, by chance, you stick around, you will have used this time to shift perception, raise your esteem and your position.
Master the Basics
Whether we like it or not, work gets boiled down to what is essential. This can be a time of great discovery as the fundamentals surface. They are, after all, a real platform for growth. Do you know your basics? Are you a master of core practices? Now is the perfect time to get your chops up. This will help you in every aspect of life.
Find Yourself
Develop a rhythm. Get to core progress. Raise your performance. You will be noticed… most importantly by yourself. But, others, too, will recognize new leadership. Everyone’s looking for rising stars. Especially in dark skies.
At this point in our economic distress cycle, most have trimmed so much fat they are in danger of cutting muscle. Yet, the challenges continue. A good friend who works at the Fed reminded me yesterday at our sons' soccer game that the Great Depression was a multi-dip experience. Jeez, I thought, what's a guy to do?
David Gammel, an expert helping organizations succeed online, introduced me to sacred zombie cows. A plain, vanilla sacred cow is, of course, anything that is immune from criticism. The term grew out of the Hindu religious esteem for cows.
But, David has gone where no metaphor has gone before, imbuing the holy domestic bovine with a new dimension appropriate to those cattle who walk among the living dead.
Gammel says, "Sacred zombie cows are programs that not only do not produce sufficient value, they are impossible to kill even when their inherent constituency no longer supports them or doesn’t exist any longer."
Why is David talking about sacred zombie cows now? "In this economic environment, you are free to create massive change. Boards will consider things that were anathema to them a mere six months ago.
"That program that was the darling of a beloved past president who has been retired for 10 years? No one will blink if you give it the axe. Use the disruption of today to get rid of some bad cows. Then redirect those resources into value producing activities aligned with current needs."
Cut Useless Expenditures Now
Muhtar Kent, CEO of Coca Cola said recently, "Don't waste this crisis. Be thoughtful about your expenditures and be sure to focus only on what delivers value."
Look around and see what resources can be converted to higher return activity. Follow Gammels' advice and use this unique window of time to take out the brains of initiatives ordinarily immune from harm. (According to the Zombie Survival & Defense wiki , zombies "can only be stopped by destruction of the cerebellum or the brain stem.")
After Pruning Resource Leaks, Build Capacity
For every sacred zombie cow that goes down, resources become available. Redirect your savings to achieve growth, returns, efficiencies, and increased performance.
Make It Personal
Are there activities that you spend time on because you have always done it that way? Now is the time to reevaluate your schedule, your commitments, your focus. You may find pursuits and passtimes long overdue for some paring. Use this as an opportunity to become lean in the best sense of the word.
No time is good for zombies. They should be rooted out whenever they appear. But, when times make it easy, go after them with a vengence. Make your streets safe to walk again. Your customers will thank you. Your members will thank you. Your employees will thank you. Your ROI will thank you.
I am excited about working with Steve Denning. So excited that I will be engaging him in a free teleseminar this Monday at noon to talk more about it. If others feel like I do, there'll soon be more.
I first joined forces with Steve in 1996 where we won international recognition for the rapid transformation of the World Bank's Knowledge Management initiative. Since that time we have worked together in a variety of venues, helping people and organizations create massive, widespread change rapidly.
Today Steve is researching how to make work work better. That means multiplying productivity not by 20% or 30% but by 400% or 1,000%! That means finding workplace cultures that don't suck, but are a joy to come to work for.
How would you like a job that you looked forward to every day when you got out of bed, one that didn't rob your soul or your time, but helped you achieve your very best in ways that were fun and rewarding? Sounds like a dream, a fantasy. Steve has been finding places that do it regularly, consistently, systematically.
Denning says these are not a few, remote, isolated incidents. There are 100s of organizations he tells me. Tens of thousands of employees enjoy these kinds of workplaces. And due to the productivity gains, it is inevitable that the rest of the planet will be going this way, too. It's just a matter of time. ...feels to me like it's just in time!
So, with all this talk of deep job satisfaction and massive productivity gains I asked Steve to tell me more. Here is what he said:
"This is a radical new way of managing work. It involves a different way of thinking about work, a different way of managing work, a different way of participating in work, a different way of working. It isn’t a quick fix. It isn’t an incremental change or a shift at the periphery. When fully implemented, it affects everything in the organization. It entails fundamental change.
"Management has to act very differently from a traditional organization. In some areas, they have to do more. In some areas, they have to do less. The net effect: this is very different way of managing work.
"This is about high-performance teams. I began looking into high-performance teams just over a year ago. They are much discussed in the literature. They are teams that are both exceptionally productive and deeply satisfying to the participants. The conventional wisdom is that high-performance are very rare and very mysterious. It’s bit like falling in love. You never know when lightning is going to strike.
My research showed the opposite. I found that hundreds of firms have figured out how to create high-performance teams almost as reliably as lighting a fire under a pot will cause the water to boil. They have created tens of thousands of these teams. It’s become a huge, global movement that hardly anyone knows about, and it’s spreading fast.
"When you manage work in this way, these teams are massively more productive than doing work in traditional ways. It’s not just 30% or 40% more productive. It’s like 200%, or 400% or 1000% more productive. It’s just amazing the difference.
"This way of managing work is deeply satisfying to the people doing the work. Exceptional productivity is not achieved by beating and flogging the team members or burning them out with long working hours. This is about working smarter and achieving high-performance in normal working hours or less. This is about productivity gains that are sustainable.
Organizing work in this way leads to excitement and shining eyes among the people doing the work. This is about organizing work so that people are able do what they love doing, and want to go on doing, with the people they enjoy doing it with. This is about improving people’s lives, not just increasing output."
I think Steve is on to something exciting and important. Come and join us at the free teleseminar if you have the time. And if you don't, drop me an email. I am sure we will post a recording you can download.
It goes on sale May 19. Get your copy as soon as it hits the e-shelves of Amazon. Not only is it a beautiful string of stories leading from one provocative insight to the next, but also Matt has some profound contributions to the way we think about life, the world around us.
There are lessons in this book for anyone who is seeking to innovate in today's crucible of economic distress. Drawing on the wisdom of a wide array of professionals May lays out principles that are immediately applicable to current challenges. The collection of minds he exposes us to, through his own experience, is as remarkable as it is useful, from a neuropsychiatrist specializing in how to unlock debilitating brain patterns to a famous visual artist known for his particularly satisfying renditions of random spills, from a traffic-investigator and engineer to the CEO of a manufacturing company who runs his organization without structural hierarchy. One has the feeling that May is introducing us to the future through an entertaining and educational theme park of ideas.
In Pursuit of Elegance is wonderfully readable. Matt has organized elegance around four simple principles and elaborated on each in ways that stimulate the mind. I picked up the book on a Monday evening and each night I supped on a single chapter, marveling at how Matt lifts the covers to reveal the under workings of elegance. By Friday I was looking at the world through new lenses.
Part of the pleasure is how he puts every day life under the microscope and comes up with eye-opening gems that penetrate the mystery of common experience: why the last episode of the Sopranos was one of the most discussed events in television history, what about the iPhone makes it so attractive, why Sudoku is habit-forming. We all want to know these things, even if we didn't realize it until we began reading the stories. Once started, you can't let up.
So, here you have a tour of new ideas just in time to help us see new patterns and figure out how to wring elegant solutions from the grand mess we are in. Buy a copy for yourself and then some. Send 100 copies to Wall Street, 1000 to Main Street, 635 to Congress and one to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, Washington, DC.
When the world is in a crucible, new forms are birthed. The previous order is reshuffled. Some at the top disappear. Visionaries emerge from the periphery. America has long looked to the business world for its visionaries, but some come from other sources.
Young Chris Hughes had perhaps more influence on Obama’s successful campaign for president than any other single person. He left a potentially lucrative position as a co-founder of Facebook to join Team Obama. There he envisioned and built the social web infrastructure that made history with its success as a campaign tool. Newt Gingrich wrote in the Washington Post, “I will be spending a lot of time over the next year studying the Obama campaign… It sets the standard for the future.”
Thanks to Hughes 35,000 volunteer assembled across the country, 400,000 blogs were created where people expressed their support generating massive third party endorsements, over 200,000 face-to-face events were organized, and $30 million was raised on the pages of 70,000 people (average $428 per page). For the full story see Ellen McGirt’s excellent article in Fast Company. Hughes is a practical visionary, showing how to work the social web to generate real results. It is not a typical business model, but it works. That is the sign of something new.
Social web. Until last year it was not clear what value there was to be had.
Hughes is only twenty-five. We have become accustomed to superstar youngsters changing the world ala Google. But, now look to our sixty-five year old Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, for insight into the future. Here is the man who presides over some of the most difficult conflicts in our nation’s history. His non-traditional approach has satisfied both George W. Bush and Barack Obama. When you hear Gates talk, he rattles your understanding of his office.
In 2007 he addressed the graduating class of Kansas State University and said, “…based on my experience serving seven presidents, as a former Director of CIA and now as Secretary of Defense, I am here to make the case for strengthening our capacity to use soft power and for better integrating it with hard power. One of the most important lessons of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is that military success is not sufficient to win: economic development, institution-building and the rule of law, promoting internal reconciliation, good governance, providing basic services to the people, training and equipping indigenous military and police forces, strategic communications, and more - these, along with security, are essential ingredients for long-term success.”
Soft power. Not a term we associate with America’s might.
It’s hard to see the Phoenix for all the ashes today, but new skills are emerging for tomorrow’s visionaries to wield their power. Here are four:
1. Accurately Assess a Holistic View of the World Hughes could read the needs of the nation. People wanted to change the channel, put someone fresh and new in the highest office. He crafted a platform that enabled them to take effective coherent action, uniting rich and poor, progressive and conservative, young and old.Gates read the failures in Iraq and Afghanistan and accurately described the missing infrastructure.
Each had the capacity to take in a system, see the pieces, their relationships, and the whole. When these three are brought together and aligned, an engine of power forms and generates massive results.
2. Develop a Deep and Comprehensive View of Those They Serve Hughes was on the system every day corresponding with users as he built the system. He knew their needs, frustrations, and yearnings. He could feel their pain and built his system to respond. Gates started as an analyst for the CIA. He understood data, patterns, and intelligence. He was able to pull them together and empathize with the plight of those in conflict. He understands what pushes people to choose sides and focuses on how to create environments where they make good choices instead of bad ones.
3. Integrate Direction, Strategy, and Objectives Gates has developed a detailed understanding of his goals that comes from years of study and analysis. He sees beyond the conflict, which is only a means to an end. He plays to the end state. Opponents are not simply overtaken, but successfully developed as allies. This means going beyond meeting basic needs and leads into strategic communication, education, and economic development. All this is built on tremendous respect and adherence to human dignity.
Hughes could see the overarching goal of his system, MyBarackObama.com, to make it possible for people to do what they wanted to do. He also understood how to assemble the components that made each piece effective in the larger framework. He successfully integrated his endgame with each step along the way.
4. Convene the Right People in the Right Context In this day and age no one person is capable of wrestling through the complexity of issues. Visionaries need to bring together leading thinkers and set the agenda for constructive interaction. They must be master Social Architects, creating interactive sessions that generate breakthroughs. Both Hughes and Gates relied on colleagues with intellectual firepower to wrestle through the complex issues they faced, and generate solutions.
This is the time when leaders earn their keep. When there is a storm, it is their job to rise to the occasion and navigate safely through, bringing their people and the world to something great. This is a time when new worlds emerge, and visionary leaders are the midwives.
The previous order will be reshuffled. Think of Lincoln who came to office with the challenge of holding the union together. By the time his work was done he was able to accomplish something that was considered to be impossible, the emancipation of the slaves. He entered the tumultuous ordeal and used its great forces to fashion a world that was far and away beyond what anyone could imagine.
With so many jobs in the balance and their fingers in so many pies I don't want any of the top three automakers, Chrysler, GM, or Ford, to fold up their tents. One way or another I want them get their acts together and turn themselves into viable businesses, contributing to America's economic engine.
They have a huge impact on our country's future, which kind of feels like a circus these days. It's hard to see everything that is going on. There is action everywhere you turn. Someone is always shouting at you, saying, "Hey, look over here! You won't believe this!" And then there is that constant sense of danger, like the lion may actually bite that guy's head off in the center ring.
When I am asked to help a big organization with large-scale change, the first thing I ask is, 'Are they doing the needed work inside the organization to create long-term, sustainable results with their customers and partners?' It is not always easy to answer, but I do my best. I try to look at the inner health of an organization to interpret the longer term prognosis.
With the Big Three, I am on the outside looking in, and it's hard to tell what's going on. So, I went snooping around, and bumped into Michelle Krebs, Senior Editor of Edmunds' AutoObserver.com. She has been covering the auto industry for 30 years. Here is a snippet of our conversation:
Me: "What's the outlook for Ford?"
Michelle: "Ford has never been great at sticking to their plan, but they brought in Alan Mulally as CEO two and a half years ago, and that is his strong suit. That's what he did at Boeing with Working Together. Now, he's running One Ford, and it looks to me like it's working. He has sold the superfluous parts of the business. The whole focus is on Ford as one company, all around the world. You see, Ford has always been this global company, but operating on a regional basis. For years we complained, 'How come they build great cars in Europe, but we don't get them here?' Finally, he knocked down the walls. So, it's the same product and there is less duplication of effort. This helps in economies of scale and marketing."
Hmm, I think, that meshes with this book I saw recently,Ford Flexes Back, written by Ford Project Manager, Kenneth Wentland. So, I called him up. "Ken," I said, "What is Mulally doing now that hasn't been done in the past?"
Ken told me, "What he brings in is this idea of speed and making change quickly. Whether it was rapid fluctuations in the price of gasoline, like the recent $2 -> $4 -> $2 per gallon, or the present economic crisis, Ford was the first major auto company to announce counter measures. This shows Ford's increase in speed-of-response, what I call maneuverability, to adjust its plan to external factors. This has increased my confidence that Ford is going to get through this."
Interesting. So, what is going on at Chrysler? To me, they seem very chaotic. Back to Michelle:
"Chrysler is a big mess. They are focused on cost, cost, cost. You have to build great product to get out of their situation. They used to be known for stylish, head-turning products like the Dodge Viper or the Prowler. The Chrysler 300 was a huge breakthrough car, a family sedan with head-turning styling. They are off that. They won't make it in their current form. Instead, there are going to be pieces. If it's going to be dismantled, there are valuable pieces."
Whew! And what about GM?
Michelle: "I think CEO Rick Wagoner has been demonized by the press. He has had a lot of work to undo from when Roger Smith was CEO. It's a slow process, slower than it should be. There is a cast of 1000s out there, lots of dead middle. But, GM will make it; they'll just be a very different company."
Me: "It does not appear GM has a coherent, targeted initiative they are pushing through the enterprise."
Michelle: "It may not look like it from the outside, but I have been covering this for three decades and I can see they have one. They were way ahead of Ford in getting started. For example, they went to a more global platform in terms of sharing vehicles earlier."
Ladeeees and gentlemen, children of all ages, step right up to the big show! Lives hang in the balance! You will see miracles by ordinary men and women, daredevil feats performed without a net! If you can stand the anxiety, grab some popcorn. Let's hope for the best.
Many of us wish we could just go back in time, before all this turmoil started. Before the mortgages went bad, before the stock market tanked, before the massive layoffs. But, there is no going back, only forward. Whatever happens we will not be returning to the naiveté (or complicit denial) in which this arose.
This is a Phoenix and Ashes scenario.
Obama is hard at work. But, he and his team cannot do this alone. Change leadership must spread. We need sparkling examples of new ways of working. Innovation, practical innovation is necessary. Hand-in-hand with hope, there is a call out to visionaries both grand and humble.
My friend, Neil Olonoff, and I were talking recently about a new, American Evolution. Neil is the Chairman of the Federal Knowledge Management Initiative Committee and they have a plan. By the way, this committee is not a government agency, but an affiliation of true believers in Knowledge Management (KM) in both private and public sector roles.
Neil and I pondered, Who is squinting into the fog, imagining America 5.0? America 1.0 = pre-revolution for independence America 2.0 = post-revolution America 3.0 = post-Civil War America 4.0 = post WWII
Neil says, “Government has to evolve, embracing collaboration for greater productivity. Isolated stovepipes need to open meaningful conversations with external stakeholders. Slow processes must be streamlined and accelerated. Efficient government action is vital to the health of our economy, and rebuilding the strength of the nation. Our plan will help them succeed.”
The committee recently delivered a letter to the White House recommending a Federal Knowledge Management Center to ensure that government activities are managed efficiently, using best practices, lessons learned, and collaborative systems.
Having worked in several large-scale Knowledge Management (KM) programs, it is easy to understand the value a KM effort would bring to our country in this challenging, overwhelming time. You can read the letter by visiting the committee’s wiki, hosted by NASA
I have not yet seen a well-spring of corporate initiatives. What about CitiBank? General Motors? The big guys who are getting so much bad press? Why are there not radical, new ideas in the media demonstrating that they are thinking out of the box, leading us into the new American Evolution?
And what about the little guys – the rest of us? Shouldn’t we be meeting in our living rooms and putting all our pent-up anxiety (and rage) to work? There is real fuel for a fire, especially with over 12 million now unemployed.
It’s time to shift the mountain. The mountain is a metaphor for a mental model that is so large it is immovable. It becomes everything, even to the point of obscuring the view. It is almost impossible to let go. Yet, spring is almost here (just 10 days away). And the early spring brings the tiniest signals, little flowers that sprout as beacons: snowdrops, crocuses, dewberries. Their appearance breaks through the cold, bleak days in the north, alerting us to new life. The world is telling us, it is time to shift the mountain.
Obama is arguably the most visible change leader on the planet with the biggest agenda. However, the Republicans in the US are also looking for change as they work to rebuild their party after experiencing the 2008 defeat.
Today, at CPAC 2009 (the Conservative Political Action Conference), the straw poll from participants was released to reveal (1) 95% disapprove of the job Obama is doing as president, and (2) Mitt Romney is selected as the front runner for the next Republican nominee for president with 20% of the vote. Jindal came in 2nd at 14% with Ron Paul and Sarah Palin just behind at 13% each.
So, we have two change leaders, each with formidable tasks. Obama is working to stabilize the US economy, overhaul healthcare, energy, and education, and then, reduce the national debt. Romney’s charge is less ambitious, but perhaps equally daunting: make the conservative agenda relevant and revitalize the Republican party as a viable choice for leadership in a country still angry at the last administration for its failure.
Here’s an interesting, sideways way to look at these two men and their vision, through visual depictions of their most recent speeches: Obama’s recent address to the Joint Session of Congress, and Romney’s remarks at CPAC. In these word clouds, the larger a word, the more often it was repeated in the text of the speech.
We can see Obama's #1 word is American. Romney's is America. Obama also most often repeats, time,care, energy, education, budget, new, now, know, plan, economy, people, American, health. Romney has at the top of his list, president, conservatives, world, free, know, country, government. Although the emphasis and context are stripped, you get a good idea the points of repeated emphasis in the pictures they are painting with their words.
Organizational storytellers are gathering again in Washington, DC this spring just in time for the cherry blossoms. This, their 9th year, promises a tour de force on the power of narrative to generate solutions for our troubled world.
For 2009 the theme is Storytelling and High-Performance Groups. I spoke with Steve Denning, founder of the Smithsonian event, global thought-leader and author of four books on the subject. He said, "This year, the symposium will take place under the shadow of the ongoing economic crisis. High-performance groups are very relevant here, because we are going to have to grow our way out of the crisis. The symposium will help show how storytelling and high-performance groups have helped deal with crises in the past, as well as how they can help do so in future, by encouraging innovation and inspiring new ways of becoming hyper-productive."
Denning interviewed me in preparation for my presentation, showing how I use storytelling to guarantee buy-in for change efforts. We talked about storytelling, hot groups, the financial crisis, and this blog. You can listen to the interview on Denning's website here.
Thursday evening, April 16, the Smithsonian offers, The Basics of Organizational Storytelling, led by Danish author, Svend-Erik Engh (Tell a Story: Be Heard, Be Understood, Create Interaction, Fokus) and performance artist, Noa Baum. Baum, an Israeli, has toured internationally to acclaim with her exceptional performance, A Land Twice Promised, which tells the Israeli-Palestinian story through the voices of four women.
All day on Friday, April 17, there is a showcase of leading thinkers in the field, offered in bursts interspersed with special sessions where audience and presenters think together. Storytelling is fundamentally about meaning making and this event provides maximum impact for all who come.
This year's business celebrity presenters include: Tom Stewart, Chief Marketing & Knowledge Officer at Booz & Company and former editor of Harvard Business Review, and Peter Guber, former studio chief, Columbia Pictures, and CEO, Sony Pictures. Guber produced such films as Midnight Express, The Color Purple, Rain Man, and Batman, earning $3+ billion in revenue, and receiving numerous Academy Awards nominations.
Peter Gruber wrote in HR Magazine last September, "The ability to articulate your story or that of your company is crucial to almost every phase of enterprise management. It works all along the business food chain. A great salesperson knows how to tell a story in which the product is the hero. A successful line manager can rally the team to extraordinary efforts through a story that shows how short-term sacrifice leads to long-term success. An effective CEO uses an emotional narrative about the company's mission to attract investors and partners, to set lofty goals, and to inspire employees. Sometimes a well-crafted story can even transform a seemingly hopeless situation into an unexpected triumph."(emphasis mine)
When you book travel to DC, make sure you stay through Saturday, because your don't want to miss Saturday, April 18, when GoldenFleece, the DC community of story practitioners, hosts the all-day session, Why Story Matters Now More Than Ever: Exploring Contemporary Challenges. This event, run by Madelyn Blair, story consultant, and Denise Lee, PWC, will bring together change leaders, executives, storytelling professionals, organizational development practitioners, students and researchers to conduct workshops and present findings.
Philip Anschutz, the American businessman with an estimated net worth of $7.8 billion, started in the oil business drilling his own wells. His first efforts in the 60s were unsuccessful, turning up one dry hole after another. When he finally hit oil, everything looked great… for a day. A crisis followed which he called “the most important single event” in his business career. A well he owned caught fire!
Anschutz heard that Universal Studios was making a movie called Hellfighters about the legendary oil-field fire-fighter, Red Adair (who later put out the oil well fires in Kuwait during the Gulf War, 1991). Anschutz persuaded Universal to pay $100,000 to film Adair putting out his well fire for their movie. The studio cut the check. Adair put the fire out. Anschutz pocketed a profit and saved his business. The footage is in the movie.
Now, why do you suppose he called it “the most important single event” in his business career? Here is more from him, “There’s always a point that if you go forward, you win — sometimes you win it all — and if you go back, you lose everything, and that was that point for me… You don’t learn that in school. You have to have the initiative, be able to be pragmatic and tenacious, seeing all of the opportunity that could exist.”
Using Everything to Your Advantage Every crisis has a powerful negative side. What is the negative right now? You are probably well acquainted with it. Evaporating retail sales, dropped meeting attendance, frozen credit markets. But, have you taken the initiative, been pragmatic and tenacious, "finding all the opportunity that could exist?"
If your retail sales are evaporating, you must ask, Why? Maybe your customers are not conducting the transactions they once were, and they do not need your products anymore as a result. Then, will you help them get back in business? Can you help address the root problem?
Can you help them find new income? Have you asked them what kind they need? They may not be able to articulate it well. Perhaps you could work with experts who have dealt with this before to lay out a series of options for your clients so they can choose, or create a hybrid approach that works for them.
If your meeting attendance is dropping, do you know the real cause? Is it because your people don’t have the money to travel? Then, what options can you provide them so they can continue to get value from you without leaving their office?
Perhaps it is a different reason altogether - maybe they work for public agencies and they cannot get travel expense money for your conference. Perhaps you could go to a format which accommodates more speakers and invite all your customers to be on the program... shift your tactics to establishing value .
Or, perhaps your customers cannot travel because it would look bad to their customers who are expecting your people to be dedicating all available resources to finding a way through this mess. Then, consider communicating straight to your customers’ customers. Have you done that before? Can you truly say your meeting is the one meeting that will bring to light the solutions they need in this difficult time? Can you make your meeting the one obvious choice for anyone truly concerned with new solutions for our time?
Every move I am describing is a judo move. You take the force that is coming at you and redirect it toward your goal.
When you are going through a difficult economic period, troubling forces are coming at you fast and furious. Now is the time to practice judo! Now is the time to get really good at redirecting difficulty, using its power to your advantage.
