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Chapter 12 -- RECESSION SURVIVAL STRATEGIES: COURAGE & ENTREPRENEURSHIP
Whether you are
a business owner, an employee or a solo entrepreneur, you will need to be at
your best to survive this recession.
Victim behavior, blaming others, the bunker mentality and obsessive
cynicism are all strategies for failure. Regardless of your own financial
predicaments, the best person to get things moving is patiently waiting for you
in the mirror.
There is more
than enough gloomy news to discourage everyone.
We all know the script: Bank failures, stock market crashes, credit
crunches, job losses and an unprecedented collapse of consumer confidence. Not that you should hide from bad news. Instead, you need to confront it and try to
understand it. But you should not wallow
in this bad news. You need to move
beyond passive news consumption and take action. Now perhaps more than any time in the past,
you need to arouse your own inner entrepreneur.
The way of the
entrepreneur is not easy. At a time when
circumstances cry out for bold action, employees often shrink into a
self-preserving shell of hyper-cautiousness.
Business owners who need their staff to come up with new ways to compete
and succeed instead are confronted with apathy, fear and hopelessness. How can you turn the corner?
What does it
take to work like an entrepreneur?
KNOW YOURSELF: First you
have to know your own strengths, be willing to believe in your own dreams, have
faith in your ability to create the results you want, know what is most
important in your life and know what you want to achieve.
KNOW YOUR BRAND: What is your
brand? Where do you stand? If you had 20 seconds in an elevator to
describe your brand, what would you say?
What stories of your life and accomplishments will you want people to
talk about at your funeral?
DRIVE: Whether you are a leader or an employee,
successful entrepreneurship requires great energy and drive. You have to get in touch with what you really
want and why that is so important to you.
You need to be able to paint a picture of your own success in your mind
then be ready to put all of your energy behind the goal of converting your
dream into a reality. You have to be
hungry for success.
VALUES: You have to know what your core values are
and what is most important to you.
Why? Because these core values
will leave their mark on everything you do.
These values have to be aligned with whom you really are and what you
really want to create. And others will
have to find your values compelling.
PEOPLE: Entrepreneurs need to attract and convince
others. They have to understand how to
motivate employees, attract investors, satisfy clients, sustain mutual trust
and treat everyone with respect. Other
people must want to get on your bus and want to travel with you. So you have to know how to listen and how to
motivate others.
HONESTY: Successful entrepreneurs start from where
they really are, not from where they would like to be. They are brutally honest with themselves and
invite honest feedback from partners, employees and clients. An entrepreneur with a bad idea wants to know
what is wrong.
INITIATIVE: Great
achievements in business do not happen without a strong willingness to get
started and to take action, even if the action is not precisely the best action
possible. We have all read the stories
of legendary entrepreneurs who started as taxi drivers, bought their own cab,
borrowed more money, bought a share in a small business then leveraged their
success into a significant business empire.
Are those entrepreneurs really all that different from the rest of us?
COURAGE: Can courage be learned, or is it something we
are born with? Dr. Merom Klein of The
Courage Institute (http://www.courageinstitute.org/) maintains
that courage is a choice we can all make about how we deal with the adversity
around us. All of us face fears, but we
need to learn what we should and should not be afraid of, then how we can face
those fears constructively. Successful
entrepreneurs are very skilled at separating useless fears from those they need
to confront and overcome. Fear of
bankruptcy is real; all entrepreneurs need to confront this fear and deal with
it. Fear of market rejection in
launching a new business can, on the other hand, keep a potentially successful
entrepreneur frozen in a stultifying career that leads nowhere.
TAKING RISKS: Along with
confronting fear, entrepreneurs need to know how to take the big risk: the risk
that will either launch them on the road to success or cause them to fail and
have to start all over again. Successful
risk takers, whether in business or any other field, need to know how to manage
risks and take control of as many of the variables as they can. Successful entrepreneurs who take risks are
sometimes very cautious individuals.
They leave as little as possible to chance. They conduct detailed risk-assessments, weigh
all their options, do their research and design backup systems in case of
trouble. But in the end they stand up
and move forward. They take the risk.
If you are a
business owner or a manager, you can help your people become more entrepreneurial. Entrepreneurship may or may not be teachable,
but it can be encouraged.
- MODEL
ALL THE ENTREPRENEURIAL ATTITUDES and behaviors you want to see in your
people
- BE
RADICALLY HONEST with them
- HELP YOUR
PEOPLE TO GET IN TOUCH with their own higher purposes for coming to work
- IF YOU
EXPECT THEM TO SHARE YOUR RISKS, be prepared to also share your rewards
- FOSTER a sense of rigorous discipline
- DEMONSTRATE TRUST in others; for many, this is the biggest risk of all
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