Confronting Reality: Doing What Matters To Get Things Right is both a book title and good advice for all business people as well as their clients and customers. The book was written by former Allied Signal and Honeywell CEO, Larry Bossidy, and Ram Charan, a former senior executive at GE, Verizon, KLM and Home Depot. Bossidy is usually very blunt, and hes almost always right. He deals with the need to accept change, saying change can be friendly for people who embrace it. Change can be decidedly unfriendly to those who resist it, especially business people, he notes. Bossidy notes that certain industries have business models broken and that they cant be fixed, since they are structurally defective and these industries suffer incurable overcapacity. This includes, but is not limited to, American automobile manufacturing, commodities, chemicals, electric utilities, airlines, telcom firms, pro baseball, and pro hockey. Bossidy advises everyone to look around the corner, because the speed and scale of change and new threats and opportunities arise faster and more often. He says that barriers to reality result from filtered information, selective hearing, fear, and emotional overinvestment. Others can filter information coming to us. We canand doalso filter our own information--that which makes us uncomfortable. Sometimes, we continue to retain emotional overinvestment in people, mindsets, clients, and worlds which not only are irrelevant--but often no longer even exist. Now, 2006, is the time to "let go" of anything in your thought life, emotional life, or business, removing all of our barriers to reality. Globalism has flattened the worlds boundaries to free trade. The Internet and todays inexpensive, global telephony make instantaneous worldwide communications very easy. The entire world can be your market. We cannot indulge smugly in provincialism, regionalism or nationalism, limiting ourselves only to United States opportunities. We have to think and act globally. We have to face facts. Too many formerly powerful industries and companies have gone out of business, merged, or are quickly collapsing from self-inflicted strategic wounds. So, to Confront Reality: Doing What Matters To Get Things Right, we need to add new clients from new industries doing new things. We cant afford to fear change. We must embrace change, accepting it as a friend. Consider new ways to find and communicate to new clients and customers-for example, teleseminars and your website, by selling your professional products such as DVDs and books online, including e-books and e-newsletters. Resolve to make 2006 your year confronting reality: doing what matters to get things right or, if things are already right, make them even more right this year. |
