I am tired of hearing from the News Terrorists in the newspapers and on the airwaves about the constant flow of negative information.
A recession is a necessary economic event to correct bad behaviors. The reason this recession seems so harsh is because we had a tremendous amount of bad behavior going on that needed corrected. Fortunately, the good news is the bad behavior was confined to a few companies. The bad news is that those few companies are large and many are tired directly to the financial structure of this country which impacts all businesses.
If you are one of those impacted businesses who didn't cause this but are being affected by this recession you have an opportunity to capitalize on it. The following three opportunities are the steps good organizations are using during these recessionary times to actually benefit from the recession.
1. Resources have never been cheaper
So many companies are going into spending hibernation trying to survive this year. Smart business owners realize resources will never be as inexpensive as they are now and are using this opportunity to capitalize on this opportunity to retool, upgrade and properly position themselves for outrunning the competition.
2. Businesses are improving processes
In fast money times production is at full speed ahead and the money machine is printing profits.T he attitude is no time to slow down and tweak and implement major improvements, just keep the profit makers up and running. This is why a slowdown is the perfect time to make process improvements, cross train and retrain employees, and increase your organization knowledge about the business so better informed employees will be ready to serve more demanding customers.
3. Encourages innovation and creativity
As sad as it is, the cliche "If it ain't broke don't fix it" really is the way many businesses run in this country. Well my friends, it's pretty obvious the economy is broken. The way many organizations have been conducting their businesses has been broken and the results are self evident. When times are good, executives are not prone to adding more change to the organization and some laziness sets in to just ride the wave. In this economy the innovator, the organization driven for creativity, is the organization finding new and better methods of conducting all aspects of their businesses and they are the organizations who are gaining market share and growing.
Instead of going through meetings with all of the bad number reporting, instead of beating salespeople over the head to drum up sales, instead of counting the days you can hopefully make payroll, shift the attitude within your organization. The doom and gloom on the lips of too many people will not energize anyone. Talk about how this is a great opportunity to try new things, and refocus and retool. Build the excitement of the opportunity. Put those improved attitudes to work on innovation and creativity and watch your organization migrate from negative to energized as you put these ideas into action.
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