I love lists. I love making them, I love checking them off, and I love the New Year as it is rife with top ten lists of everything. Lists are a nice, neat and concise way to sum up what we have accomplished, what we need to do and what we should avoid doing. This post concentrates on the latter.
Unless you subscribe to the apocolyptic Mayan view of 2012; in which case you should be ticking off your own bucket list and/or stocking up on canned goods and bottled water and not wasting precious time reading blogs; the following are 3 things I hope you do not do in 2012.
- Do Nothing
In challenging and uncertain economies it is very tempting to hunker down and do nothing. However, the “nobody moves and nobody gets hurt” philosophy is untrue and if you think you are holding steady, you are not. Change is the only constant and if you are not moving forward, your competitors are which makes you vulnerable to loss of market and opportunity. It is scary to invest in a bad economy but that is exactly when you need to do so the most. When dollars are scarce, the competition is fierce and you need the best people, products, marketing and sales initiatives that you can afford. If your ideas are great in a good economy they are great in a bad one and those who hesitate are lost
2. Do everything
Just as some of us are prone to freeze like deer caught in a headlight, others deal with uncertainty like the proverbial chicken without his head. Constant movement is great for your waistline but will wreak havoc on your bottom line. Trying to do everything at once without a cohesive and strategic plan is never a good idea and it is a really terrible one in tough times. When the economy is uncertain, you need to be very certain and have the discipline to follow your strategy and build on your strengths. The economy will recover but you won’t if you dilute your brand and waste resources on initiatives that are short-sighted, off-message and not your core strength.
3. Do Anything
Doing anything is almost worst than doing nothing. Hard times and bad news compel us to action but action in itself is not a solution. If you are in a position where you are willing to do anything to help your business, you have bigger problems than the current economy. Desperate times do not call for desperate measures. On the contrary, they require thoughtful analysis of the problems and strategic and sound planning of the solutions. Recessions rarely kill businesses but merely culls the already weak and crippled ones. Rather than moving ahead with half-baked ideas, use this year to fix the underlying problems which will enable you to ride out this recession and future ones.
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