Lessons in Staying Positive – #5

Words: 595. Reading time: 1 minute 59 seconds.

So many people read book after book on better management, leadership, engagement, marketing, even surviving the recession. Some will admit they are searching for the newest technique. Few recognize their hunt as a quest for the Holy Grail of enterprise.

They attend workshops and seminars and briefings believing that one day, if they attend enough, or just attend the right one, then all those things they struggle with will disappear – they’ll know all the answers.

Perhaps this fifth lesson will provide that answer: you will always have issues to solve. The fact is they signify that the business is in a rapid learning phase. And the more issues you have the more rapid the learning needs to be.

Faced with uncertainty your possible responses go beyond the simple alternatives of flight or fight. Psychologists now also recognize freeze (extreme vigilance while immobile), fright (“playing dead”) and faint. In business there is usually a sixth reaction – flap.

And flap is what we see and hear most. It emanates from people in both business and Government. It’s most avid propagators reside in the media where any event is expressed in whatever superlatives comes most readily to hand: biggest/lowest/deepest/highest…since…the war/the 1930s/this century/this year.

It’s interesting to note the more sober and considered findings from some times of previous panic.

A study conducted by McGraw-Hill of the relationship between marketing and sales in 143 companies during the severe 1974-75 downturn found that those companies that did not cut their marketing in either of the negative growth years had the highest growth in net income during both the recessionary years as well as in the two subsequent years.

And in a study of the 1981-82 recession McGraw-Hill found that companies that cut their marketing increased sales by only 19% between 1980 and 1985. However, those companies that continued their marketing during the downturn enjoyed a 275% sales increase over the same period.

So-called difficulties, like complaints, are a gift.

So-called difficulties will have some folks running for cover, unwilling to face their own fears and failings – always forgetting that failure is a sign we are growing.

But difficulties, once faced, are seldom as bad or overpowering as they first seem.

A story, adapted from Aesop, tells of a soldier on the way home alone from a glorious battle who meets a small, puny looking monster. Proud of his martial prowess the soldier beats the monster about the head. Soon the monster lies in a heap on the ground and the soldier strolls on.

Within minutes the monster is in front of him again, but now he looks somewhat bigger and somewhat less puny. Once more he batters the monster to the ground, but this time it takes a great deal more toil and trouble.

Finally victorious the soldier wearily continues along the path, only to find himself facing the monster for a third time. This time the monster is so much bigger and so much stronger that it is the soldier who is defeated and he runs away, back the way he came.

Meeting an old comrade the soldier urges him to help him defeat the monster. As they approach the place where the soldier first met the monster he sees it has returned to its small and puny size. His friend laughs and says:

“If you pick a quarrel with something unpleasant when you don’t really have to, then it simply grows more unpleasant. Let’s just leave the feeble little thing where it is.”

So they did. They simply brushed past it. And the monster never bothered them again.