How Do I Hold on To What I Have During This Bad Economy?

Headlines are reading, "The Sky Is Falling," you hear bad news about houses not selling, you read about companies laying off thousands of workers and you might want to...panic.

But there is a better way to deal with today's economy. You see for everything there is a polar opposite. Your job is to zig when everyone else zags. Your job is to find the opportunities that are probably sitting right in front of you.

The difficulty is that in an economy like we face today, doing what you have done in the past will no longer suffice. In today's economy those companies that have excellence as their base rather than as the star they try to reach are the ones that will succeed. If people are going to spend money they won't accept mediocre, they won't accept marginal, they will be pickier. So that means you have to be sharper. You have to be exceptional. You have to produce results, not busy work.

Today's economy is not one to be feared, if you are performing at top standards, if you have systems in place and if you are dedicated to customer success, not customer satisfaction. The best asset you have in your corporation is the people. Yet so many companies look at today's economy and look at how to cut expenses. That is a dying path if it is done solo. What you need to do is look at how to explode opportunities, how to differentiate and how to build a corporate culture that gets every person to give 110% to their job with a positive and optimistic attitude.

What will get you to to excel in today's economy is how you think. Does your company take appropriate risks? Do you have people making decisions on their knowledge and experience? If so, you are in for scary times because much of what you may face will be situations and opportunities that you have never faced before. This requires you to be able to apply Critical Thinking to make decisions rather than just knowledge and experience. Just basing it on knowledge and experience will cause you to freeze up, gather too much data rather than take action, and make decisions that you later say, "I didn't anticipate... or I should have seen..."

Take action today to make this economy the best you can for your company. Now is the time to invest in developing top level strategic thinking and execution that is based in excellence. It means letting go of the past and trying things in a new way to create new opportunities.

For those fearless people, today's economy is one that is ripe with opportunity and growth. It is more of a cleansing than a drowning. A time to come out refreshed, renewed, and recharged.

May you go forth and have a great Outcome Focus Day Filled With Results!

Anne Warfield, www.impressionmanagement.com