Читать книгу The Owner's Manual for Small Business - Rhonda Abrams - Страница 13

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Embracing Change

Things Are About to Change

You’ve finally got it right. Your product is almost perfect. You’ve got loyal customers, and your sales are clicking. Your employees show up enthusiastically and do their jobs well. Your suppliers are steady. Everything’s great! Know what this means? It’s time to start worrying.

It’s not that I’m a pessimist, not at all. It’s just that the one certainty I have about business life (as in all life) is that things change.

Knowing that things will change is good to remember in the midst of bad times, but you’ve got to keep it in mind during good times, too. If you’re overly complacent, happily believing you’ve figured everything out, then you’re unprepared for the changes that are inevitably just around the corner.

Some companies, especially those dealing with technology, have change at the very core of their existence. But even if your business is selling something as apparently unchanging as chocolate chip cookies, change is inevitable.

Take Levi’s. The basic Levi’s jean has hardly altered in over 150 years (except for the removal of a metal rivet from the crotch, which caused unpleasant side effects for miners warming themselves next to camp fires. Ouch!). But Levi Strauss & Company changed dramatically during that time. Its market went from miners to minors in the 1950s, and expanded to the entire world by the 1970s. Levi’s went from being a purveyor of work clothes to the world’s largest fashion manufacturer, and when the business world adopted “Dress Down Friday,” they went back to providing work clothes through their Dockers division.

It’s even more important for a small company to be able to embrace change. After all, one of the key advantages a smaller business has over a huge corporation is its ability to quickly respond to new opportunities. But you have to prepare your company for a world of constant change.

The first challenge is to understand what kinds of change improve your company’s ability to survive, and what types of change threaten its very identity. In one of my favorite business books, Built to Last, authors James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras show how the best companies identify their “core ideologies,” which remain constant over the years. They differentiate those ideologies from “noncore practices” which can adapt, evolve, or disappear over time.

Collins and Porras cite the department store Nordstrom as an example. Nordstrom’s core ideology is “Service to the customer above all else.” If they lose sight of that ideology, Nordstrom would cease to be Nordstrom.

But the fact that they have a piano player in each store is a “noncore practice” which they could change if times demanded.

For change to be effective, you have to encourage a change-oriented attitude at every level of your company. People are generally more comfortable with old problems than with new solutions, and it’s natural for employees to be threatened by change. But you can help reduce those fears.

The best way to create a change-welcoming workplace is to start by hiring people who seem flexible. Look for attitude, not just skills, as part of your hiring process. Next, get everyone thinking about change all the time, and make it a normal part of business conversation. Informally, and in scheduled meetings, ask employees to discuss the kinds of changes they anticipate facing in their specific areas of responsibility. Remember, employees are often in a better position to foresee changes than you are.

To help get a focus on change, I recommend delineating the specific types of change your company may face and addressing each separately.

Just remember what someone once said, “Even if you’re on the right track, if you just sit there, you’ll get run over.”

Types of Changes Your Company May Face

Market changes. Nature and number of customers, customers’ buying habits and patterns, demographic and sociological shifts

Industry changes. Distribution channels, vendors, availability of capital, key economic concerns

Competitive changes. Nature and number of competitors, new entries, new types of competition for your category

Technological changes. Hardware and software products and services that could positively or negatively affect your product or service’s marketability, as well as technology you could adopt to improve operations

Sales and marketing changes. Marketing approaches and vehicles, sales channels, sales force, advertising and promotion

Management changes. Availability of adequate staff, management patterns, pay schemes and levels, benefits, recognition programs

Operations changes. Production/manufacturing or delivery/fulfillment methods

Is It Time to Throw in the Towel?

Every time one of my projects flops, I ask myself: “What did I learn? What should I do differently next time?” This helps me snatch a bit of victory from defeat. And, I hope, it keeps me from repeating the same blunder over and over.

When something is going badly—really badly—it’s a good idea to throw in the towel sooner rather than later. I’m not a card player, but I’ve heard that if you’re dealt a bad hand in poker, you should toss it in early. The more you put in the pot, the harder it will be for you to fold and the more you’ll likely lose.

Every undertaking needs a reasonable chance to develop, of course. New businesses, for instance, usually take from two to five years to become profitable. If we’re too quick to quit, we’ll never make a go of anything. But there’s a difference between prudent patience and being unwilling to face unpleasant facts. Next time you’re having one of those 3 a.m. heart-to-heart sessions with yourself, wondering whether it’s time to get out of something, ask yourself these questions:

What direction have things been going? If you’re in a downturn now, is it a momentary glitch in an otherwise positive picture or one more in a long series of defeats?

Are you learning, improving? Sometimes, a specific situation may not be a huge success but the increased knowledge or skills you’re developing are worth the effort.

What is your “opportunity cost?” What could you be doing with your life, your time, your money, instead? Are you passing up other chances to succeed by sticking with this?

What effect is this situation having on you, your family, and friends? You may be willing to forge ahead but at what price to your own and others’ well-being? Are you really doing others a favor by keeping them connected to a declining situation, or could they move on to other opportunities as well?

Finally, take a good hard look in the mirror and ask yourself whether there’s truly a reasonable chance, not just a last-ditch hope, that things are going to get better. Can you ever get things to work or are you just avoiding change? Sometimes it’s time to make the tough choice, hard as it is, to get out.

There’s an old Bulgarian proverb that says, “If you wish to drown, don’t torture yourself in shallow water.” I hope I’ve finally learned, when I’m in a doomed situation, to at least give it a quick death. And then I can face the future bravely and move on.

Change Takes Time

I once saw a handwritten note over a jar for tips: “If you fear change, leave it here.”

We all fear change. Yet we all want to change—our habits, our appearance, our income. Most of us want others to change—our spouses, our children, our employees. Sometimes, no matter how much we want change, no matter how hard we try, we just can’t seem to make it work.

One problem is that we want change to happen overnight. We go on extreme diets or change business direction suddenly. We want to be able to push a button—like a Star Trek transporter—and immediately get from one place in our life to another: “Beam me up, Scotty.”

Change is a process, not an immediate outcome, a journey rather than a destination. The most difficult stage of change is when you’ve come part way but haven’t left old ways entirely behind. Experts say it takes at least a year for a change to become a habit. So be patient with yourself and others. Change takes time.

When you plan on making a change—or want a change to happen in others—recognize that you’ll go through stages:

1. Contemplate. You start thinking about your goals, but they still seem unachievable.

2. Reframe. You start saying, “This is going to happen; I can make this work.”

3. Plan. You convert desires into specific, realistic actions you can take.

4. Commit. You make a real commitment to your goals and plans.

5. Try and fail. You begin to make changes but you’re inconsistent; you fall back into old patterns.

6. Recommit. You remind yourself of your goals, your plan, and your belief that you are capable of success. You start again.

7. Habit. You consistently change your behavior.

Turning Failure into Success

I’m often asked by business students, “What’s the key to being a successful entrepreneur?”

I have a clear, but surprising, answer: “Change how you think about failure.”

In business, the stress is always on success. Seminars promote “Small Business Success.” Magazines run stories on “Secrets of Success.” Even I’m guilty—my first book was titled The Successful Business Plan.

Failure is the “F word” of business—it’s not polite to mention it. After all, failure is what happens to other people, right? But what about when we fail? We either try to forget the experience quickly, or we wallow in self-doubt and recrimination.

But if you’re in business, sooner or later, you’re going to have failures. I certainly have. I’ve had big deals that have fallen apart, partnerships end, even a business I needed to close. But sometimes, these “failures” have turned out to be fortunate; they’ve forced me to re-examine my goals, decisions, methods. Then, I’ve been able to choose to take a different—better—path.

I’m not alone. Most successful people (there’s that word “success” again) will tell you that some of the most important, most beneficial, events in their lives were things they viewed as “failures” at the time. But they used their failures to learn new attitudes and skills, to move on to new opportunities, and to get perspective on their lives.

Failure does not lie in an event itself; it lies in how we see that event, and what is learned from it.

Of course, some failures have a major economic impact on your life, such as bankruptcies or divorces. But even these significant, very painful, events can be seen as a chance to start on a new path, over time.

Here’s how the best entrepreneurs deal with failure:

Redefine it. I asked a large company how they dealt with employees’ failures. “We don’t have failures,” I was told. “We have learning experiences.” I live in Silicon Valley, California, and one reason this area breeds innovation and new companies is that when someone has started a company that later fails, they’re not considered a failure. Instead, they’re considered to be an experienced entrepreneur.

Analyze it. Football coach Bill Walsh said most people view games as either win or lose instead of focusing on what they learn while losing. That’s how they’ll eventually become winners. A venture capitalist friend of mine said he only invested in entrepreneurs who had started at least one failed company. He wanted them to have learned hard lessons before he gave them his money. If—when—you fail, take a close look at the causes. After each and every setback, big or small, take a clear, cold look at what happened.

Depersonalize it. Stop kicking yourself; everybody fails. Steve Jobs is a billionaire, running two successful companies simultaneously (Apple and Pixar), but do you remember his NeXT Computer? It failed. And he was once fired from the very company he founded (Apple). Analyze your mistakes, but you won’t learn anything if you’re too busy beating up on yourself.

Change it. Okay, so now you know what you did wrong. Here’s the hard part—you actually have to change your behavior. Did you take on too many projects at once? Push too hard to make a sale? Start a new venture without enough research? When you find yourself in a similar situation, stop. Remind yourself of what you learned and actively try to change your behavior. Be patient and forgiving because change takes time.

Get over it. Move on. Don’t dwell on your successes or on your failures. You’ve got a life to live, and each day is precious. So, like the old song says, “Pick yourself up, brush yourself off, and start all over again.”

The Promise of Change

Few things are as hopeful as opening day of the baseball season. Every year, I welcome opening day as a symbol of getting a fresh start, a clean slate.

Opening day of the baseball season is a new year that’s truly new. The box score reads 0-0. All things are possible. It doesn’t matter how you did before, or what other people think of you. For instance, on opening day 2002 Sporting News and Baseball Digest predicted the Anaheim Angels would come in dead last in their division. That year, they won the World Series.

I don’t like many of the sports metaphors used for business, but if any sport is analogous to business, it’s baseball. That’s because:

You make errors.

You’ve got many chances to try again (162 games).

There’s no set time limit.

Strategy is more important than sheer size or strength.

The rich guys aren’t always the most successful (in spite of what Yankees fans think).

Most importantly, if you bat .400, you’re in the Hall of Fame!

Get Over It!

My friend Ann, a psychotherapist, recently shared with me her two-step program for mental health: “Get over it. And stay over it.” I’ve found Ann’s program serves equally as a terrific prescription for better business health.

Ann’s advice sounds flippant, but it’s not. In every life—and every business—bad stuff happens. We all encounter our share of defeats and disappointments, disloyalty and deceit.

When bad things happen, we have to deal with them. But there’s a difference between dealing with something and wallowing in it.

Most of us know someone to whom we’d like to shout Ann’s advice: an employee who harps on situations resolved long ago, kids who keep whining even though you’ve told them “no” ten times, a spouse who brings up old spats like a broken record.

“Get over it!” we’d like to yell. “And stay over it!”

Yet, we, too, may find ourselves stuck on old issues. If we tried making a big change—introducing a new product, opening a new location—and failed, we may be paralyzed and afraid to try anything new again. If we entered into an important relationship—with a partner, supplier, spouse—and were cheated or mistreated, we may find ourselves mistrusting everyone. It’s easy to nurse old hurts.

But old hurts block new ideas, new chances for success or happiness. When we’re stuck in the past, we can’t move forward. To improve our businesses, and our lives, we have to find a way to forge ahead. So no matter what failure or setback we encountered, we have to learn how to get over it. Once we do, we have to teach ourselves how to stay over it.

When we’re stuck in the past, we can’t move forward.

That’s not easy. So how do we follow Ann’s two-step program?

Get over it. To get over something, first you have to deal with it. You can’t just pretend it never happened. Repression, as I’m sure my friend Ann the psychotherapist could tell you, isn’t the answer.

Real problems have real consequences, and they have to be resolved.

Business failures or setbacks typically leave us with financial, credit, or legal messes needing to be cleaned up. It may take a while to get those straightened out, but doing so is part of the process of getting over it. Neglecting them is a sure way to stay mired in the original defeat.

Getting over it also means trying to figure out what happened and why. It’s easier to move forward when you see what you’ve learned from a bad situation, what you’d do differently next time, what you can do to make it better now. Perhaps you need to apologize to those you’ve wronged or forgive those who’ve hurt you. And, if necessary, say your goodbyes.

Stay over it. This is where it really gets tough. In the short term, even when you’ve been very badly hurt, it’s easy to tell yourself that you’re over it—for a day, a week, or a month or two. But how do you put it behind you permanently?

Yes, I know, some things are impossible to forget. Failures, losses, disloyalty—you can’t just pretend they never happened, and you wouldn’t want to. It’s important to remember your past, what you’ve learned, what you’ll change.

But remembering isn’t the same thing as holding a continual pity party. Old hurts are like scabs—they heal best when you stop picking at them. When you find yourself thinking about old disappointments—feeling angry, afraid, or sorry for yourself—make yourself stop. We all have internal conversations with ourselves. Now’s the time to remember Ann’s two-step program and tell yourself firmly, “Stay over it.”

“Get over it—and stay over it.” I’m not sure I’d advise you to use those words the next time your mate, child, or employee complains. But it’s a good message to give yourself—again and again. Because once you’re over those old defeats, you’ve got a better chance for new victories.