In a time of constant disruption, fear has established itself as a sales tool in business solutions. Escape from this paralyzing fear and from the essence of optimism build your business model with the desire to be a benchmark. Focus on your bottom line and eliminate the “fear is good for business” from your brain. In the face of fear, leadership.
We live in a world without alternatives.
This is how forcefully Leonidas Donskis writes in the book “Liquid Evil” that he wrote with Zygmunt Bauman. And he continues, “it is a world that proposes a single reality and that brands those who believe that there is an alternative for everything, even for the best models of government and for the most profound ideas, as lunatics, or at the very least, eccentrics, and let alone for business projects. The world has never been so infested with fatalistic and deterministic beliefs as it is today.”
I link it with another phrase that has made a fortune, “Fear is good for business.” We are facing an era where fear conquers and convinces. At a time when the great challenges for society and companies are adapting to a quantum change unprecedented in history, an aura of panic has settled in business leadership.
That fear sells at a social level is not new, the challenge of the unknown always implies a cultural change in any organization, and in this phase of adjustment to the new reality, dissonances occur that in most situations are perfectly salvageable.
Fear has become a sales tool in large consultancies, taking advantage of this gap between the unknown and what will come in the future.
Who has not attended conferences, presentations, round tables and various talks where elements such as “the apocalypse of retail” have been presented, “if you do not digitally transform, your company will die in two years”, “either you apply this technology or you will be out of the market in 6 months”?
Even with the purpose of trying to escape this climate of “fateful pre-sale”, the system works and organizations buy. Many times they do not know exactly what purpose, but they buy, they will surely not implement anything at a strategic level in the company, but the sale is already made.
In the face of fear, leadership. There is no better recipe. A leadership that knows how to define the real adaptation needs in the business with a single value or paradigm, “Focus, Focus and Focus”. Focus your effort on what your income statement tells you, the rest is science fiction. Focus on what optimizes the purchasing experience, focus on what improves the relationship with your customers, focus on what improves the work environment of your employees, focus on what makes you more competitive, faster, more agile and more pro-active. In short, focus on what makes your product or service better, makes your customers better and makes your employees better.
Don't listen to fatalistic recipes, if you are convinced of your business model, optimize it through innovation, adapt it to the market and apply everything that improves your focus on the bottom line. But always positive. Flee from the “paint and color” gurus of innovation, flee from those who on paper everything is precious but insubstantial in your business model, flee from magical solutions (unicorns do not exist) and flee from any technological solution that does not add real value to your business.
Build, create, optimize, focus, innovate, improve, but without fear, do not do it out of fear of losing but out of the desire to be a benchmark.
Jordi Crespo
