Manage the crisis

Samuel Johnson once said, ‘‘Courage is reck­oned the greatest of all virtues, because unless a man has that virtue, he has no security for preserving any other.’’ You begin managing the crunch crisis by first cutting your losses.

Brian Tracy believes that the most important quality for business success in the twenty-first century is flexibility. “With the explosion in knowledge and technology, com­bined with the rapid growth of de­termined competition, both nation­ally and internationally, products, processes, services, markets, and customers are changing at a more rapid rate today than ever before.” You have to be flexible in the face of this rapid and ceaseless change to maintain your mental health, much less to survive and thrive.

Charles Darwin wrote, ‘‘Sur­vival goes not necessarily to the strongest or most intelligent, but to the species that adapts and adjusts most rapidly to changing circum­stances.’’

Remember management experts believe that 70 per cent of your decisions in business will turn out to be wrong or disappointing over time. That means 70 per cent of your products and services will not succeed in the marketplace, or not succeed at the level that you had expected, and 70 per cent of your staff will not turn out to produce the quality of work that you had hoped for. Even the best decisions you have made can be invalidated because the situation or circum­stances will have changed in the meantime.

ZERO-BASED THINKING

Perhaps the most important tool that you can use to remain flexible and adaptable in turbulent times, and to deal with the inevi­table crunch points that will befall you, is what Tracy calls ‘‘zero-based thinking.’’

In zero-based thinking, you stop, stand back, and look at your business objectively, as though you were an outsider looking in. You ask this question: ‘‘Is there any­thing that I am doing today that, knowing what I now know, I would not get into again if I was starting it up again today?’’

Discipline yourself to ask and answer this question honestly on a regular basis. It takes tremendous courage to confront the reality of your current situation by asking the ‘‘Knowing what I now know . . .’’ question about everything you are doing.

Is there any product or service that, knowing what you now know, you would not offer or bring to the market if you had it to do over again today? If there is, your next question must be, ‘‘How do I discontinue this product or service, and how fast?’’

Management expert Peter Drucker calls this the process of ‘‘creative abandonment.’’ You must be prepared to abandon any prod­uct or service that is draining time and resources away from the sale and delivery of more popular and profitable products and services.

MANAGING THE CRISIS

Beverly Smith once said: ‘‘To be courageous means to be afraid but to go a little step forward anyway.’’ It is believed that in a fast-changing, turbulent, highly competitive business environment, you will have a crisis of some kind every two or three months. You also could have a financial crisis, a family crisis, a personal crisis, or a health crisis with the same frequency.

By definition, the crisis will be a major problem or setback that happens completely unexpectedly, is disruptive, and takes precedence over whatever else you are doing at the moment. A crisis forces you to go on what the military calls ‘‘Red Alert!’’

A crisis is a critical moment, a ‘‘testing time.’’ Whatever you choose to do, or fail to do, can be extraordinarily important and have significant positive or negative con­sequences for the future of your business or your personal life.

TAKE CHARGE

IMMEDIATELY

According to turnaround experts when the crisis occurs, there are four things you should do immediately. (1) Stop the bleeding. Practice damage control. Put every possible limitation on losses. Pre­serve cash at all costs. (2) Gather information. Get the facts. Speak to the key people and find out exactly what you are dealing with. (3) Solve the problem. Discipline yourself to think only in terms of solutions, about what you can do immediately to minimize the damage and fix the problem. (4) Become action-oriented. Think in terms of your next step. Often any decision is better than no decision.

Remind yourself that you are up to the task. You can do it. You can find an answer and resolve this crisis. You have all the skills, intel­ligence, experience, and abilities that you need to handle this crisis effectively. Remember that there is always an answer, a solution of some kind, and your job is to find it. Often the solution is contained within the problem.

PRACTICE THINKING AHEAD

One of the key strategies for business and personal success is ‘‘crisis anticipation.’’ This strategy is practiced by top people in every field—executives, managers, en­trepreneurs, and leaders, especially military leaders.

You practice crisis anticipation by looking into the future three, six, nine, and twelve months ahead and asking, ‘‘What could happen to disrupt my business or personal life?’’ Of all the things that could happen, what are the worst possi­ble things that could happen?

Refuse to play games with your own mind. Do not wish, hope, or pretend that certain things could never happen to you. This way of thinking could be disastrous, and needlessly so.

Develop an ‘‘If this happened, then what?’’ mentality. Even if there is only a small probability that something disastrous could occur, the superior thinker carefully considers all the possible conse­quences of that disaster occurring and prepares accordingly.

DEVELOP A

CONTINGENCY PLAN

You need to have a contingen­cy plan for possible emergencies and crises. What steps would you take if something went seriously wrong? What would you do first? What would you do second? How would you react?

Develop a scenario—a story line and a plan—describing how you would handle a negative situ­ation, if it occurred. Brian Tracy calls this ‘‘extrapolatory thinking’’ and is the hallmark of superior problem solvers. They look down the road into the future, imagine what could happen, and then come back to the present to plan well in advance of the possible occur­rence.

J. Paul Getty, at one time the richest man in the world, was once asked how he thought about risk. He replied that when he entered into a business deal, the first thing he asked was, ‘‘What is the worst possible thing that can happen in this situation?’’ He then made every effort to guarantee that the worst possible outcome did not occur. You should do the same.

PREVENT THE

RECURRING CRISIS

A crisis, by definition, is a once-only, unexpected, negative event. If there is a recurring crisis in your company or your life, one that repeats itself regularly, especially a cash crisis, then you are dealing with a deeper problem, usually incompetence or poor organisation.

To ensure that the crisis does not repeat itself, after you have re­solved that crisis for the first time, do a thorough debriefing on the problem. What exactly happened? How did it happen? What did we learn? What could we do to make sure it does not happen again? The military calls this “after action review.”

According to Stanford Univer­sity research into the top CEOs among the Fortune 1000 corpo­rations, the single most important quality of the best leaders was their ability to deal with a crisis when it occurred. How you manage the inevitable crisis is the true mea­sure of your level of wisdom and maturity. Your ability to anticipate a crisis, and to learn from it, is ab­solutely essential to your ability to deal with subsequent crises when they occur.

Nonetheless, in all this, Wayne Dyer believes that the most ef­fective way to teach anyone what you would like them to know is through behavior not words. He opines that words not backed by action become simply “preaching point” and nothing more. If you want to make a point you may need to create a “meeting point” with new and effective behaviour.

BY CAPT SAM ADDIAH

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