When Life Gets Tough
By Adam Radzik
Consultant to Professional Firms

The interdependence of the world economy is being dramatically displayed by the economic woes that now plague the Americans, the Japanese, the Koreans, the Russians, the Australians, the British, the Chinese and even the Icelanders. The yo-yo jumping of the stock market; the demise of major investment, insurance, and bank institutions; the retrenchment of retail sales; and tepid corporate earnings all point to rough sailing ahead. What will happen? The institutions that went to where they should not have gone will pay the price for their poor judgment. They will be absorbed by more stable competitors or they will simply go poof and disappear altogether. Professional firms that had very big stakes in those industries will follow their ailing clients into oblivion.

Just about everyone I know is concerned, worried, or just plain scared. Some believe we should begin to hoard food. What can we do? Our first choice is to decide how we view this crisis. Maybe it’s not really a bad thing. Maybe we should be vomiting out excess, manipulation, self-deception, absurdly poor judgment, and lack of meaningful oversight. Maybe that whole scene was a bizarre nightmare that had to come to an end. Maybe it’s actually a good thing that steps will be taken to prevent such vulgarity from recurring. Maybe we were sick and needed to get rid of the virus that was making us deathly ill.

Will we be able to avoid a recession? Of course not! Economies have always ebbed and flowed. This one will too. We need to accept that this is part of life. What about expenses? Expenses will rise. Taxes in some form will rise. The fiction being propounded by the presidential candidates that taxes will get reduced in a time when the spending of the U.S. government is rising by the billions every week is a total fiction. But we will survive increased taxes as well. This won’t kill us.

Which companies will survive? Those companies that will be involved in the constant pursuit of excellence will not succumb. Do you know why? Because their customers won’t let them go under. Customers know when a firm is offering excellence, and they talk about that excellence within the company. They also create a word of mouth campaign in the business community that publicizes the unrivalled value received by the customers.

One of the key ways in which the most successful companies accomplish excellence is by training their employees in every important area. They do not assume that their employees should know everything intuitively. The more successful the company, the more elaborate and the more pervasive is the training program. In the final analysis, a company is merely a collection of the talents, aptitudes, and efforts of its work force. The more the workforce is trained, the more they are capable of taking advantage of their potential and joint resources.

In summary, this cleansing had to happen; we will survive the recession. And finally, invest in training your people to become excellent in every area of their work behavior. Remember, excellent companies do not go out of business.

Comedy Corner

MENTAL HOSPITAL PHONE MENU

Hello and thank you for calling the state mental hospital. Please select from the following options menu:

• If you are obsessive-compulsive, press 1 repeatedly.
• If you are co dependent, please ask someone to press 2 for you.
• If you have multiple personalities, press 3, 4, 5, and 6.
• If you are paranoid, we know who you are and what you want ; stay on the line so we can trace your call. 
• If you have short-term memory loss, press 9, press 9, press 9
• If you have low self-esteem, please hang up. Our operators are too busy to talk with you.

We are indebted to Jaimie Jesmain for her gift of humor.