3 Rules for These Times
I’m hopeful when I read:
Most economists agree that the worst of this financial meltdown is now behind us. Unemployment is at a 25-year high, it’s true, but at least the pace of lay-offs has slowed. If there was a doubt before, it seems safe to conclude that we’re going to make it through this mess. There will be enormous social costs. People have lost their livelihoods and their life savings. Seniors have seen their retirement nest eggs disappear; young people have seen their employment hopes vanish. But we’re going to make it.
In his Conversation Starter blog, Alan M. Webber (Harvard Business Publishing) offered some basic business rules to get us all back on the right track.
- Ask the last question first. The last question is, what’s the point of the exercise? What is the answer that fits our situation in 2009, and beyond? We need to ask the last question first – or risk going down the old dead-end path.
- Keep two lists, one that holds what gets you up in the morning and one for what keeps you up at night. Managers and leaders have got to know themselves before they know their businesses. They’ve got to have passion for their work and concern for their world. Otherwise they’re just punching the time clock and risking everyone’s future.
- Don’t implement solutions. Prevent problems. Everything that will be put in place as a clean up to the mess we’re in now won’t be enough if we keep creating new disasters. We need a new generation of business leaders who anticipate problems and prevent them from happening. It’s smarter, cheaper, and more effective than the every-ten-year clean up we’ve become accustomed to.
Webber notes:
These rules reflect ways of seeing the world, ways of making sense of everyday business realities. They teach a way of thinking and a way of synthesizing the world of work that every crisis–and every opportunity–shows us we need. And second, they are about people, not about business. They are about the human side of enterprise. They carry the message that work is personal. That each individual has a contribution to make and a decision to weigh. That we have to decide not only what we will do in business, but even more important, how and why we will do business the way we do it in the first place.
Read these and his other 49 rules in Webber’s recent book, Rules of Thumb, a collection of 52 life lessons.
June 7th, 2009 at 1:48 pm
I like Alan’s comment about “Don’t implement solutions. Prevent problems.”. Clearly good economic conditions covered up the high number of poor performances and poor decision making, in not only our industry, but others as well. Now is the time to look back on the individual disasters of the last 12-24 months and determine how not to make the same mistakes again. We have: squandered resources; not invested in the right areas; overspent in others (including M&A targets) etc. The economy will be slow to fully recover so sr. staff must eliminate the possibility of repeat failures because, in some cases, the business can no longer tolerate as much as a single additional mistake/disaster without dire consequences.