It has been interesting to observe the reaction of the financial community subsequent to the train wreck that drove the global economy over the cliff.
The futile efforts to return to the days when profit was not the goal, but rather the consequence of a money-go-round of commercial sleight-of-hand that placed impossible pressures on managers to perform.
But in every storm cloud there is a silver lining for those who see what their competitors are doing and then doing exactly the opposite, meaning instead of trying to re-establish the impossible, quietly salvaging the best of what exists, while adding creative possibilities that will maximize their flexibility in a melt down market.
Today flexibility rules; the ability of a company to adjust and readjust to the pressures the key to creative adaptation. Compare this with competitors that slavishly rely on a twelve monthly planning cycle and the advantages become clear. If your company can turn on a dime in reacting to the unexpected, then it has a distinct advantage in an unstable environment.
But you need to be competitively creative. Not just in the how you motivate your people or engage with your customers, but in managing a business that is highly original in such seemingly familiar things as structure, communication, teamwork, responsiveness, service, technology in other words rather than doing what is expected; think about what is not expected.
In broken economies where the customer is king there is the opportunity to redefine performance by thinking beyond best practice. The capacity for management to question its own thinking, the key to building an organization that stands out from the crowd, not because it has the best advertisements, but because it does what is says it can do.
