Lies About A Doomed Economy And Why we Believe Them

September 10, 2009

Time to Hear the Real Truth

As we work our way through this economically challenged period, you’ll notice the economy getting a little better. Even media outlets now understand they’ve begun to lose audiences over the constant negative hype – or should I say “objective reporting”? – so they have to get a bit more honest. Amid all the bad news, a recent CNN newscast uncharacteristically acknowledged that the crime rate is down 38 percent since 1980. As much as it may tick off the doubters, things are getting better, like they always do.

Economic TruthYou know me not to be a Pollyanna; I’m pretty realistic about things. I’m not buying into the end-of-the-world theory. I had to laugh the other day when I came across a TV show called Life After People. You know we’ve fully bought into the doom concept when a show about the world moving on after humans have died gets a prime-time spot. What’s next? How to Be a Regretful Corpse? Let’s face it: Things are getting better and there is nothing we can do about it. 

Six Signs That Our Situation Is Getting Better

A Time Line for 2009

  1. The swine flu headlines, coupled with major use of the word pandemic, turn out to be overblown. When it comes down to it, this sensationalized flu was just – well, the flu. And a weak flu at that, claiming fewer than 500 lives in the United States. Let’s put that into perspective: Each year in the United States, car accidents kill about 50,000, the flu kills about 36,000, and at least one guy dies from getting sick in his car. In reality, cars and the regular old flu are relatively deadly but we shrug them off as negligible hazards because we’d rather obsess about the swine flu! I guess swine flu sounds so much more menacing and devastating, like evil devil-pigs are scheming and plotting to infect your neighborhood. (When we’re no longer impressed by swine flu, we can worry about the newest health threat, the H1N1 virus. Just hide your disappointment when you learn it’s another name for swine flu.) 
  2. We ignore clear signs that the real bad news is drying up. The other day I honestly thought I was watching the Michael Jackson Channel. The Glittered Gloved One had his fame and income-generating ability reconstituted in the only way that seems to work consistently: He died. He was a great talent, for sure, and his resurgence of fame is proof that there was not enough bad economic news to edge out the coverage of his passing. 
  3. People work hard to take the encouraging edge off of any statistic that shows economic improvement. You’ll hear something like this: We did not lose as many jobs as we predicted last month but unemployment is still high. Translation: We made a negative prediction that we hoped would get attention, and it turned out we were wrong. But just because the rate of job loss is topping off does not mean people have enough jobs. So things are bad, even if they are not quite as bad as we’d hoped! 
  4. USA Today begins to print lame recession stories. In “One Step Back: Retail Sales Slip; Jobless Claims Tick Up,” we learn that retail sales slid 0.1% in July after increasing 0.8% in June. While a cursory reader takes in the headline and thinks we’ve tanked again, readers with a greater attention span get the bigger picture: Hello, we’re still up 0.7%! And the really astute reader sees that these numbers are all just fractions of a percent. Other headlines help confuse the issue: “Economy Seems to Be Coming Back; Consumers Not So Sure,” followed by “Stocks Drop as Investors Worry About Consumers.” So who do we believe? The consumers reading the headlines? The investors reading the consumers? Or the analysts reading the actual numbers? If I were a betting man, I’d go with the actual numbers…but that’s just me.  
  5. We start talking about Iraq again and pretending that North Korea is a threat. Let’s get real. We might not be the most popular country on the planet, and we have our drawbacks as a culture and people. But I have hung out with high-ranking U.S. military officers who told me that we could beat any country in a war over the weekend “if we had to – if only they would let us use all the cool war technology we have!” That’s pretty scary, but it makes a strong point. (It also makes me glad these guys are on our side.) No country is a traditional military threat. (Terrorism, sure – but an invasion? Not so much.) I guess with a 24-hour news station and only about an hour’s worth of actual news to report, we have to worry about something. 
  6. My 80-year-old dad has gone back to complaining about physical ailments and what’s wrong with whoever just left the room.

 Focusing on the Real Truth

We have to get back to the real truth: Life has it bumps. We overreact and make the bumps worse sometimes, but then we eventually return to the business of living and moving forward.  

Wynn Solutions has found that the most successful people in this slump did not hunker down and ride it out. They fought their way through and even grew in a way that will make them super-successful when the economy is fully restored. Cutting back on sales and marketing or canceling meetings is not the road to success. Neither is reducing the quality of your ingredients to cut costs. (I just ate at a restaurant that served me something that might best be described as a chicken knuckle.) 

My company has been blessed, like many of you have been, with a lot of business in 2008 and 2009, and we all know we did not get there hunkered down. (Even the phrase “hunkered down” paints a picture of someone slumped over in a shallow hole. It’s self-defeating!) We got there by finding our unique edge and applying or customizing it to the shifting needs of our market. As I’ve often said, you can pray, but then you have to get up and act like it worked! You rarely move ahead if you sit on your behind.   

This point is a recurring theme in my new book, The REAL Truth about Success: What the Top 1% Do Differently, Why They Won’t Tell You, and How You Can Do It Anyway (published by McGraw-Hill and available worldwide in bookstores on October 9th and on Amazon.com now). Through a decade’s worth of interviews, I’ve learned that some of the nation’s most successful people get where they are by acting on some distinctive edge or personal advantage. They aren’t necessarily the best or brightest or even the most talented – but they know what’s special or unique about them and put it into play, positioning them well in a competitive market. 

And much like the headlines above, our interviewees were a bit evasive about the real truth … mainly because the truth might not sound intriguing or impressive enough! 

We found that people at the top often give misleading answers when you ask them questions about how they got there. In fact, they tend to give reasons for success that sound identical to answers we got from people who are not very good at what they do. We heard far too much consensus, so we changed our method of questioning. “No offense,” we’d say (which is exactly what you say right before you offend someone), “but a thousand people do what you just said and they are not successful like you! They are not No. 1, so clearly what you told us is not your key to success.” The revised approach generated some different answers – some shocking, some ridiculously simple, and some downright weird. 

Ultimately, we discovered that what the top 1% did not have in common was a good attitude, superior intellect, and talent. What they had were advantages that gave them an edge. Everyone has advantages; it’s just that most people don’t know what their advantages are, don’t know how to use them, or have beliefs that make them think they shouldn’t use them. That makes these lies about success much easier to tell than the truth. But the real truth – in my book and in the points above about the economy – is far more encouraging than the “spun truth” that we’re fed every day.
More on economic speaker Garrison Wynn.

3 Comments | Business Growth, change, History, Modern Society, success | Tagged: , , , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ginger Dailey Wynn

Don’t Overreact! Avoid creating your own economic downturn

April 17, 2009

Are we doing all we can to weather a difficult economy? In previous articles, I’ve pointed out that some people fare better than others. A few of us are even defiant in our approach. I recently saw a lady wearing a button that read “I refuse to participate in the recession.” I guess that’s better than wearing one that says “I’ve lost the will to live!”

How to survive economic downturnMost of us are doing the best we can, but “the best we can” might not be good enough. We might need to do things better than we can, which means we have to look at how we think, examine what we believe and even get some help.

Do we hunker down, cut back all our expenses, let a few people go, watch the news and prepare for the world to end? Or do we increase our efforts, pinpoint our markets (which means targeting those who actually have money) and make sure our bosses, customers and employees can see our value?

The knee-jerk reaction is to adopt the first approach. The media makes it easy to buy into messages of desperation and doom – have you noticed CNN anchor Anderson Cooper’s really nice way of telling us there’s no hope? Seeing a 40-year-old with a head full of gray hair makes us feel like being overly worried is normal!

We need to avoid behavior that indicates we look at life through loser-colored glasses. That kind of behavior reveals a defeatist attitude that saps our productivity and affects the way other people value us. So beware of those doom-tinted lenses – the dismal view they offer can make even those who work in the public sector begin to question job stability: Are we going to get government money? Will even we have layoffs? Is the job I took because it had more security than the private sector still secure? Will we finally get rid of that employee who’s been here for forty years, smells like Doritos, does zero work and yet can’t be fired?

Unfortunately, sometimes we’re not even aware of our defeatist behaviors, even though they are obvious to those around us. Watch for these five signs that indicate ineffective plans to succeed in tough times:

  • You cry in front of your employees or coworkers with alcohol on your breath.
  • You fire the slightly overpaid “New Guy” for borrowing your lucky stapler (the red one you’ve had since 1992).
  • Your boss keeps uncharacteristically patting you on the back.
  • You’re concerned about how a slowdown in business will affect morale so you cancel the annual meeting in Las Vegas. (Nothing says “Be afraid! Be very afraid!” like canceling the one meeting people actually want to attend.)
  • You decide that keeping the office temperature at 88 degrees will save some money and weed out the wimps. (Our research shows that sweaty people are less productive and more likely to short out their keyboards.)

Let’s not miss the underlying point here: The “we’re doomed” view leeches the value right out of us. It erodes our ability to perform and to lead. It’s easy to spot and long remembered.

Practical Pointers for Surviving a Tough Economy
The better strategy for making it through a difficult economy is not so irrational or overreactive. It involves identifying what opportunities still exist rather than mourning last week’s losses or obsessing about calamities to come. As the value of everything around us recedes somewhat, we want to be the ones who stand apart because we’ve redoubled our efforts, identified opportunities and asserted our value.

I won’t tell you that you need to have positive attitude. Hope and faith certainly help, but they’re not enough to float you effortlessly through a shake-up. So, while a positive outlook is great to have – recommended, even – what we really need are realistic actions that make a difference. I’ve listed a few here.

Hang on to your most talented people.
Treat them well and make sure they know they are valued. Our interviews with top performers showed that many of them jumped ship in the past because, as business slowed down, management made them feel they weren’t important anymore. Some were even let go and then were begged to come back, usually to no avail.
Remember that even in a difficult job market your top people have options. They will leave if they feel unappreciated. The people who suck, however, are yours for life!
Keep things as normal as possible.
Don’t participate in activities that prove you don’t believe things will bounce back. Unless you have a small business with big cash-flow issues, look at yearly costs or longer-term costs. You might decide you have to reduce expenses, but be creative – take time to assess what’s really important. Discontinuing your marketing and sales efforts or sacrificing quality for greater profitability is a terrible idea with a bad track record. To move forward, you typically have to spend some money or inspire more effort from your employees. You don’t get anywhere if you simply tread water. (Let’s face it: Treading water really means controlled drowning.)  Research shows that the best way to influence people is to make them feel valued – important information for those who hope to get more effort from their workforce. Canceling meetings that employees really like or cutting out the best part of the meeting does not make much sense. Our research in this area shows that bad food and bad presenters make attendees think you don’t value them. They will put up with a lesser location and a mediocre hotel because it shows you are mindful of costs. But if you give them bad budget spaghetti and line up Crazy Jimmy from Marketing, who mistakenly believes he is both smart and funny, as the keynote speaker, the meeting attendees will think “Wow … do they just hate us?”

Think of it this way: If you are at home eating a bad TV dinner with arctic freezer burn when your cable goes out, leaving you stuck watching what appears to be a very fuzzy Fantasy Island rerun, it does not matter how comfortable your couch is, how realistic your artificial plants look, or how much your spouse tells you to get over it. You’ll still feel miserable.

Refrain from talking too much gloom and doom at the office.
One woman recently told me her boss instructed her department that they could discuss rough times at lunch but anyone caught going on and on about it in the office would be written up for dragging down morale. While that policy might have some freedom-of-speech implications, it does reinforce a sense of accountability: We are responsible for our own emotions, and we must look closely at the effect our emotions will have on others. If the words we utter won’t solve things or brighten things, why utter them again and again? It only opens us up to something I call implicit quicksand: When we believe we have the right to draw others into our personal pain, they naturally assume the right to draw us into theirs, and we all get sucked downward deeper and faster together (sounds like an episode of the TV show Lost).  Those of us who let bad news dominate our thoughts should remember that whatever we focus most of our attention on is what our life looks like. It’s like asking people in their eighties how they’re doing. Because they probably don’t work or spend much time anticipating the years ahead, the answer will likely involve a physical ailment.
Check the motivation of your sources
Don’t listen to the media or investment gurus about the state of the economy. The media makes no money with good news. If the news is really good, we just change the channel. And as I’ve stated in other e-news bulletins, their information is false. Despite media assertions that we live in a depressed, crime-ridden country, crime is down 37 percent since 1980, and we are not in a depression. A depression is when your non-FDIC bank loses your money forever, driving you and your flapper girlfriend to drown your sorrows at the local speakeasy. The worst crime sprees occurred in the early 1930s, when everybody hated banks so much that when you robbed one, people actually helped you escape.  In other words, what we’re experiencing now is a mere shadow of worse events in our history, not some new, uncharted course into a darker future than we’ve ever seen. History repeats itself only if we don’t create safeguards to prevent it – and we did. We might experience some new problems, just not the “Oops-the-bank-lost-all-your-money!” problem.

It’s equally important to remember that some investors tend to drive the stock market down with bad news because they hope to buy low and sell high. They are motivated to give the worst news possible. Don’t listen to those guys! When times are tough, listen to rich people in the twilight of their lives – they’ll be the most honest. Billionaire Warren Buffett doesn’t need your money, and he’s old enough not to care what the public thinks of what he says. (People over 70 tend to lose their filter, I’ve noticed.)

For example, last month on CNBC, Buffett said our economy had “fallen off a cliff” but then emphatically stated his conviction that “everything will be all right. We do have the greatest economic machine that man has ever created.” A few days before that, he wrote in his annual letter to shareholders that “our country has faced far worse travails in the past,” including a dozen or so panics and recessions in the 20th century and unemployment rates of up to 30% during the Great Depression.

“America has had no shortage of challenges. Without fail, however, we’ve overcome them,” he wrote. “Though the path has not been smooth, our economic system has worked extraordinarily well over time. It has unleashed human potential as no other system has, and it will continue to do so. America’s best days lie ahead.”

Tough economic times are just part of the journey we go through to get wherever we are going. We always say it’s the worst ever when we are in the middle of it, we are always glad when it’s over, and it always eventually is over! The key is not to take such drastic action that our solutions become worse than the problem we’re trying to solve. We want to avoid overreacting to the point of causing our own personal economic crises. Our reactions are what we have the most control over … although watching reality TV shows may cause us to question that.

We happen to be at that place in history where the economy got bad again. It does that every now and then. We usually have about five good years, five mediocre years and five tough years. There is a name for that – they call it life.

2 Comments | change, stress, success, Success Qualities | Tagged: , , , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ginger Dailey Wynn

If Your Customer is Treading Water (controlled drowning), Throw Him a Life Preserver.

March 23, 2009

life-preserverWhat’s interesting to me is that when times are tough, when there’s an issue with the economy, some businesses do really well and some do not — and these are businesses in the same industry. For many, the economy is like pizza: When it’s good, it’s really good, and even when it’s bad, it’s still pretty good.

What I see making a big difference are attitude and belief. If you’re walking around thinking things are tough, that’s the mind-set you have. What you focus your attention on is what your life looks like. It’s the vibe people get from you. It’s going to be the way you present things.

Attitude and belief can help you through a tough time, but not by flat-out ignoring difficult circumstances or willing them to magically disappear. You have to first recognize that tough times are temporary and then work quickly to address the needs that arise during difficult conditions. Don’t let the media tell you what your life looks like; remember that good news does not sell newspapers. Have you ever noticed that really depressing news stories are often followed by Prozac commercials?

Most companies — and most people — that succeed when times are tough make sure they get more focused on the needs of the customer in the moment. To succeed, we can’t be stuck in the long-term needs we’ve identified over the years. That’s probably not where the customer’s head is right now. You’ve got to sharpen your focus on what’s really important to customers here and now. If your customer is treading water (which is nothing more than controlled drowning), throw him a life preserver. You can teach him to swim later. Once you’re past the crisis, there’s always time to get customers back on track with what you know will benefit them long-term.

People and companies that are really successful during times of transition often have to work a little harder, investing more thought, more time and even more money to do as well as they did before. But even though they expend more resources to perform as well as last year, they’re not losing ground in a companywide shake-up or industrywide slump. Odds are, they’re still moving forward. When business picks up again, they will have cemented their usefulness to employers and customers and can resume a better version of “business as usual.”

Leave a Comment » | change, Customer Service, Leadership, management, Motivation, Success Qualities | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Ginger Dailey Wynn

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