Business View Caribbean - November 2016 7
Corner
View
Well, well, well, Business Viewers! Here we are again at the end of another calen-
dar year – a time that provides many different opportunities for reflection. And
that reflection requires many different lenses, and should be viewed from many
different angles. Things may need to be flipped upside-down, or inside-out, or
outside-in, or right-side up but backwards. Point being: look as long as you may
need to look in order to find the bright spot. This doesn’t mean that you need to
live in a fantasy world if your business is not performing well, and perhaps try-
ing to look at the bright side is causing a disservice to the due diligence of your
management.
What it does mean, is that when you can find a bright spot, you can improve on that to create a winning equation
for the future. It has been proven in many studies that when executive management doesn’t have an optimistic
view of the challenges that a company faces or has faced, it is immediately transferred throughout the company
as a “lack of confidence.” More times than not, this lack of confidence is a downwards slope that is rarely recover-
able. Those who have recovered, had to start from scratch, with a new staff, new goals, a new ideology, and new
protocols. Due to this aspect of recovery being awfully expensive and time consuming, you can see how most do
not recover at all.
A few months ago, we mentioned that the most effective executive is the one with the best skill of peering deep
into the future. The further you can see, the further you can go. However, to accompany that skill, there must also
be that quality of optimism paired with the ability to make the paradigm shift necessary to approach the tackling
of challenges.
I’m reminded of something that was imparted to me years ago: wisdom comes to us in only two ways -by mentors,
or by failure. Wisdom is your greatest asset as an executive for your company. Through wisdom, all issues can be
solved. Depending upon your personal route to greatness, mentors may be plenty or few, but failure is an absolute
that most everyone will experience. Those who triumph are able to reflect on the failures through obtaining the
wisdom of what not to do. The optimism in these situations is the realization that you are happy to have the aware-
ness to see what went wrong, how it went wrong, and then have the humility to take responsibility for those actions
so that they don’t become reasons for the need to start from scratch, or fold the chairs and close doors for good.
Until next time, plan, build, and continue to prosper.
Andre Barefield
