segunda-feira, 23 de abril de 2012

Understanding the Greatest Challenge for Managers

Escrito por Curt Finch.

The current state of the global economy has created new challenges for companies all over the world.  This has led to executive decisions being made out of panic, such as firing quality employees and slashing important programs.  Regardless of their efforts, many companies have seen plummeting revenue streams, sometimes being forced out of business altogether.

It may surprise you, but I actually believe that the greatest challenge in this economy is avoiding the mistake of blaming everything on the economy.  It is easy for managers and executives to wring their hands and say, “This is the worst economy we have had in 80 years, and that is why my company has all of these problems.”  To a certain extent, they are right.  Yet that type of thinking does not lead to solutions.

What if the economy never improves very much? Take Japan for example: they have been stuck with an anemic economy for decades now. Of course I know the tsunami didn’t help much either. Yet within that environment, some Japanese companies have excelled while others have withered or accepted the status quo.

Is the sale of Apple products like the iPad or the iPhone 4G suffering from the economy?  Considering the fact that people will wait in line for 12 hours to get them, I imagine not.  People will wait in line that long to buy something that they really want.

So how can you offer something that people will want regardless of the economy?  The first step is to wake up and realize that things will never improve for your company until you do something to make it happen.  You can figure out how to improve your products or find new markets – maybe even create new markets – where you can outthink, outsell and outperform your competitors.  Is there a problem in your industry that everyone recognizes but no one is fixing?  Fix it!

Once you have convinced yourself that new opportunities in a recession are possible, you just have to convince everyone else with whom you work.

And that is the real challenge of this economy.

About Curt Finch
Curt Finch is the CEO of Journyx. Founded in 1996, Journyx automates payroll, billing and cost accounting while easing management of employee time and expenses, and provides confidence that all resources are utilized correctly and completely. Curt earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science from Virginia Tech.  As a software programmer fixing bugs for IBM in the early ‘90’s, Curt found that tracking the time it took to fix each bug revealed the per-bug profitability. Curt knew that this concept of using time-tracking data to determine project profitability was a winning idea and something that companies were not doing – yet… Curt created the world's first web-based timesheet application and the foundation for the current Journyx product offerings in 1997. Learn more about Curt at http://journyx.com/company/curtfinch.

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