Distractions To Success Are Always Demanding Attention

I Love To Ride.  Not When My Tax Deadline Is Due, However!

How organized are you?  Do you have trouble trying to remember stuff?  I do.  I get my plate so full of things I want to do that I actually overload my ability to remember all of them.  Some of the things I would like to complete do not matter as much as I think they do.  Even those things can weigh my list of thoughts down.  If I get too many of those 'not-so-important' things listed in my head that I want to see done, I can overload my list and forget to do some of the more important things that need to be done.  This can grow into a fairly serious problem for a business owner.  Skipping to do some important 'need-to-do' stuff can creep up later and bite the business bad.  Make sure you do a better job managing the list of things you need and want to do in your business life.  Getting yourself better organized on the lists of things you plan to do is a vital part of where your success will land.  Get your list of do's better organized.

First of all, what kinds of things should be on that list?  Keep in mind, a business owner should somehow develop a serious pattern of work habits that take care of the routine required responsibilities.  If the owner does not actually perform these routine tasks, someone hired should.  In the end, required business duties should not be something that must be remembered to be placed on a list of things to do.  They are routine tasks that are already being managed in a time structured way.  If not, change that kind of arrangement.  Routine responsibilities must be met on a regularly known, already applied schedule.  Routine business tasks should never be something we try to remember to place on our "to-do" list once in awhile.  They are routine work that is completed in a routine fashion.  That is one of the secrets to success.  Make sure your business practices this step.  Get a routine schedule knocked out to support the required duties the owner performs.

To make this first step happen well, an owner needs to decide what kind of required work is part of the owners daily routine.  If the owner has adopted to perform some of these routine responsibilities, make sure they are completed with a routine level of success.  For example, if the owner becomes the daily radio advertising voice of a marketing campaign, make sure that owner stays disciplined enough to perform that daily task, every single day.  If the radio deadline to do that daily segment clip is 10 AM, then the owner must make sure that task is not interrupted at 10 AM.  There should be no reason why the owner needs to add that routine step to his daily "to-do" list.  It is already part of his routine pattern.  Every day at 10 AM he is calling the radio station to complete that daily message.  That responsibility has already been set in place, established in the daily routine of the owners schedule and therefore does not need to be on a reminder list.  The owner does not need to add, "put pants on" to his getting-ready-for-work list of activities.  He already puts his pants on in a routine way.  He does not need a reminder to put his pants on, too.  It may sound silly, but I have watched many really smart business owners get this kind of stuff out of control.  They can struggle with routine responsibilities.  They will often make arrangements to sabotage their required work duties.  I have seen it happen a lot of times.  Distractions to success are always demanding attention.

Speaking of distractions, I have seen loved ones call the owner at 9:57 AM and want to talk about something they think is very important, and it usually is.  Unfortunately, they do not fully know the owners routine at work and when they hear his radio spot every day at noon, when it actually airs, they do not know he makes that segment happen at 10:00 AM every day.  When they call him at work at 9:57 AM and he says I will need to call you right back, they feel shunned a little bit.  They know their news is also important.  They do not fully comprehend his structured routine to success.  I have watched many owners fail to properly manage this challenge.  It gets messed up a lot.  Learning how to juggle loved ones needs with the requirements of the business is a tall art to paint.  Get good at communication on this one.  It can come back to bite the owner very hard, in one fort or the other!  Trust me, both the business model and the loved ones care a lot about the owners level of attention.  It is a tough nut to crack.  Good luck with finding the balance.

My point in this post is to identify where the routine stuff needs to be placed and respected.  So many business owners fail to perform their leadership tasks really well mostly because they are so disorganized.  They are whimsical about what they need to do each day.  They usually hate the domination effects of a routine pattern of required duties.  Owners also hate to be told what to do.  They like their freedoms.  That is one of the main reasons why they decided to own their own business.  If today they want to travel to the city to go see a new manufacturer of a line of goods they are considering to offer, they like the power of making that decision at 9 AM this morning and skip right past the radio responsibilities.  I watch business owners perform this kind of disorganized managerial crap all of the time.  They do not like to be controlled by the routine of responsibilities.  As a result, they justify the decision to go to the city and add failure patterns to the rest of the required work they need to do.  I see this kind of stuff happen more than the owners will ever admit.  Distractions to success are always demanding attention.

One of the main reasons why smart people do not often win at the business game is that they do not know how to control the quiet ways they sabotage their success efforts.  Most owners do not recognize how success happens.  They truly believe that success comes from their good creative ideas and their subsequent spot on, whimsical "direction-making" efforts.  Not true.  Never true.  Not ever to be true.  These notions of how success actually happens are completely false notions.  Unfortunately, thousands upon thousands of business owners still believe them to be true.  As an outsider looking in, it is so disturbing to see this kind of sabotage keep so many owners away form simple success.  They get sideswiped by quiet, yet effective moves of disrespect for an organized approach to their business routine.  They fall for the love of the freedom call and break their routine strides for doing what needs to be routinely done.  They permit more distractions to take control.  They give those distractions too much attention.  It is part of the internal drive of the owner to produce more of the freedom call.  Distractions to success are always demanding attention.

What Does "Cooking Your Books" Look Like?

Think More Clearly!

What does "cooking" your books look like?  Sometimes it does not look like "cooking" your books.  Many business models do not believe they are performing acts that would be considered "cooking your books."  First of all, let's talk about why people decide to "cook" their books.  Before we can truly examine the common ways many people "cook" their books and why many do not consider it "cooking" is to learn how we must truly accept why this process occurs.

First of all, the pressure to perform is very high.  We live in interesting times.  The economy is tougher to manage than ever before.  The rules of the business world are ever changing.  The amount of uncontrolled changes that hit the business scene on a regular basis adds unknown pressures to the performance landscapes.  These increasing unknowns compressed by a shrinking economy deliver an atmosphere that breeds creativity for survival.  Survival desires are troubled enough to cause more creativity for reporting what is not going well.  This is where the most common seed of "cooking the books" begins.  The desire to survive and the pressure felt to paint a better picture of where we are headed sets the stage for some new creativity to occur.  Leaders begin their trek to discover interesting ways to report how they plan to recover from their packages of debt, efforts of failed patterns and in many cases...near destruction.  Hence, "cooking the books" procedures begin.          

The decisions to make bookkeeping adjustments that should never be made are driven by the strong dislike to report terribly bad results we have been producing but do not want to reveal.  No leader desires to continue to produce unfavorable economic results.  "Cooking the books" is a natural way to satisfy a strong urge to hide what has been already done wrong.  We do not want to carry anymore responsibility for those terrible business results anymore.  So we kind of develop a logically designed creative plan to adjust how we report what we want to do...rather than reporting the wrong stuff we have been doing.  Truthfully, we talk ourselves into doing wrong things to hide what we have done in order to further improve what we really want to do.  We cheat a little bit.  We arrange for making some bookkeeping adjustments that we can attribute to logical explanations that will help us get rid of our negative pattern of unwanted numbers and results.  We "cook" the books.  We use educated accounting methods and techniques to accomplish this kind of band aid goal.  We "cook" the books.  We get really creative in our accounting techniques.  We strategically shift some bad performing numbers to new areas and place them in balance to those new areas of review so we can pull them away from where they usually would be placed.  We "cook" the books.  We report bad results in new ways.

Again, be reminded why we do this kind of creativity.  We believe we cannot live with the true patterns of previously produced negative results.  We also believe we have a better plan to correct those errors.  This kind of combination drives us to find creative ways to accept the past wrongs.  This whole process seems to give us new permissions to continue on and try directing new and better ways to do the things we do.  This kind of scenario helps provide the justifiable support for creatively hiding what has been done wrong.  We are able to logically justify why the wrongs can be swept under the rug in a creative and acceptable way because we truly believe we have the repair and solutions on the right path for future success.  Therefore, we "cook the books."  What's more, we can strongly justify why this step is very necessary.

In the beginning of this whole process, somewhere deep inside our soul we recognize and begin to deeply believe that we are not able to produce favorable numbers and business results in the same fashion we once did.  We concede fully to this terrible notion.  We have tried so many things in so many ways to make our numbers work well and produce favorable and consistent business results.  Unfortunately, we have failed constantly at that effort.  This "feeling" becomes one of our most damaging patterns that supports how we begin to logically define how we can accept a strategic process for beginning the long effort of creativity for learning how to structurally begin "cooking the books."  We deeply know we are not able to produce favorable and consistent business results in the previous ways of operations.  This main stream of "feeling" dominates how we constantly think about the business model we lead.  We have grown to become at odds with the potential for success this model can currently produce.  We do not believe it can happen until the numbers meet where we want them to reflect.  We believe it is the numbers that are wrong.  We logically climb onto the buss that works its patterns to blame the past and we want to remove how that past continues to kill our future.  This is where the seed of "cooking the books" begins.

Many leaders get to this point and do not fully recognize the future damage they are setting in place.  They are too blinded by the creative logic of repair they have adopted.  They only need to report the past in a more acceptable way in order to be able to convince others how to move onto the future repair they want them to see.  They do not see how they creatively begin the process to "cook the books."  The storm of wrongness begins.  It looks like good weather when it first begins.  It becomes much like the calm before the storm.  Some terrible winds and damaging weather is just around the corner.  Batten down the hatches...here it comes.

Managing Errors In Business?

Mistakes Happen, Just Do Not Encourage Them!

I like watching professional sports, sometimes.  I get a little bored with some of the player and owner antics that come along with the professional sports world within its integrated money issues.  I can, however, live with the spirit of great athleticism.  I am often amazed at the effort and ability of so many players.  I enjoy watching how certain players seem to come up with fabulous play.  It is exciting to watch.

Some of you know that my youth to college life was dominated by a lot of baseball.  I ate, drank and slept a lot of baseball in my life.  My time chips centered around that sport.  One of the things I have grown to appreciate about that sport is how one inning a player can become a real goat by making a terrible mistake.  Then three innings later that same player may become the hero for doing something extraordinary that caused the team to win.  It is a sport that offers so many mistakes a second chance.  It is funny how one player can become the hero when earlier that same player was on the everyone-condemnation list.  I have worn those shoes.  I have felt terribly small for the mistake I made in an earlier inning and later in that same game, steal a base that caused a wild throw to score the guy ahead of me, which eventually proved to be the winning run.  Stuff like that happens.  The professionals know this truth very well.  They have seen it over and over in their career.  A mistake is not the end of the world.

How do you manage the errors you make in the business you own?  Do you try to cover it up and hide it away from the others to see?  Do you sweep it under the rug?  Do you allow it to take you down?  Do you ignore the mistake and make it again?  How do you manage the errors you make in your business?  Listen, we all make mistakes.  Nobody comes to the dinner table perfectly designed.  All have fallen short, according to the 'real' book of life.  I like the word "all."  That does not usually mean sometimes, somebody.  It means, everyone.  There are no players that can escape this truth.  "All" have fallen short.  "All" have made some errors.

I created a big mistake yesterday.  It was very aggravating.  I am one of those people who is a high-need achiever.  Errors do not fit well in my world of play.  I am my own worst critic.  So when I make a big mistake, I am typically pretty hard on myself.  I wage war on the mistakes I make.  I hate them.  I had a nurse tell me the other day, "You do not need to be perfect."  She was referring to my diabetes eating habits.  I had a scheduled follow up with her the other day on my benchmark routine work to see how I am managing my type 2 diabetes.  My wife and I have taken this work very seriously.  We have been able to manage our diet in such a good way that my sugar counts have been managed low enough to remove the need for taking any more medicine.  We have been able to successfully manage my type 2 diabetes with an improved diet and exercise routine.  During the examination, the dietary nurse told us that we did not need to be perfect in our efforts.  Her comment might have something to do with the spreadsheet of our recorded vitals we turned in to her, reflecting how we track morning, noon and night all of our diet activities.  She may have noticed our efforts of over-kill.

When they diagnosed my diabetes, I asked enough questions to wear the poor doctor out.  I told him to get this challenge under control right now and get me started on the medicine.  At the same time, I asked the doctor what I had to do to get off of that medicine.  He spelled out the plan and defined where my vital marks must remain in order to remove the medicine.  Those marks and that plan became my goal.  I wanted to remove the need for medicine to manage my diabetes challenge.  I shared that plan with my wife and off we went.  We reached those marks and have removed the use of medicine.  This is a good example of how my wife and I work.  We hate mistakes and mismanaging our eating habits had to be corrected.  That is likely why the dietary nurse made the comment she made.  She likely witnessed our intensity to meet our goals.  That is likely why she said, "You do not need to be perfect."

In life, nobody is perfect.  Never.  We error all of the time.  It is not usually the error that takes a small business down.  It is the repeated series of errors that usually do the trick.  Small business models usually fail because the owners do not manage their errors very well.  They either lose control when errors are made or they do not eliminate the repeated ones that hurt the most.  To error is human.  To mismanage the human errors is a troubling pattern to follow.  I will likely be able to refrain from making the mistake I made yesterday because I recognize exactly how I made that error happen.  I will correct the wrong steps I made that led to that error.  Make sure you perform your leadership in this type of fashion.  You do not need to hide your error.  Expose it, address why it happened and determine what you will do to refrain from making that same one again.  That is how you manage errors in your business model.

This is easier to do when you are making the errors.  It is altogether a more difficult thing to manage when your staff or employees are producing costly errors.  Now you discover the approach has a whole different kind of tune.  Your reaction to someone else and their costly error becomes a new set of leadership challenges.  It does not look exactly the same to an owner as it does to the employee.  One has to pay for the error, the other usually does not.  Errors look altogether different to the person who has their wallet on the table.  The person who has to pay for the error has a slightly different perspective developed on how to take errors less serious.  The sting of the cost may distort how they view the error.

Going Out Of Business? Let's Throw In The Towel.

Never Stop Promoting Your Business

I had a business friend recently tell me that writing a business plan was too much work.  I am serious.  He described to me why he does not waste his time trying to come up with ideas and systems for deciding what his business should do.  At least not in that way.  He said he finds it is a lot more efficient to do the right stuff he needs to do when that right stuff comes up.  We talked for a short while.  He continued to talk about some of the problems he has experienced in recent years with his family and business.  He described how anxious he was about getting to retirement so he could call it quits.  I had not seen him for about ten years or so.  He has a small sporting goods store.  It currently has a going out of business sign pasted all over its store front windows.  I was very confused about the conversation.  Maybe we should just throw in the towel?

I decided to ask him if he needed help in writing a new plan.  The above was his answer.  He described to me why he does not waste his time trying to come up with ideas and systems for deciding what his business should do.  At least not in that way.

Apparently he is going to try to do some other business.  He described it to me a little bit.  I could not see its future so I lost interest in the conversation.  His current sporting goods store has struggled for several years.  He had a business partner in that model who was the founder and original owner of that business.  They were lifelong friends.  They had a good working plan for many years.  Somewhere along the way they got lost.  I noticed how much energy and excitement that business model used to produce many years ago.  It was filled with young customers and families roaming about in the store.  The store was always fashionable, exciting and a central part of the community activities that drove outdoor sports.  Snow skiing, water skiing, white water rafting, mountain climbing, snow boarding, windsurfing, skateboarding and trail hiking were major categories of huge interest to this business.  They used to schedule community bus trips to the regional mountain ski slopes every Saturday during the snow season.  They sponsored the high school ski teams and instructed the ski team students.  Some of their past students were state competitors with two becoming winners of state championships.  They used to manage a white water rafting trip every weekend down a class of good rivers during the late spring and summer months.  My wife and I have taken that trip a few times with them.  We have some great memories that came from a couple of those trips.  I remember how the food break for lunch was always classy!  They pulled out the stuff to set it up and it was always like a fancy dinning experience on the shores out in the middle of nowhere next to the rushing waters of the river nearby.  I remember the lunches!

I remember shopping for school bags for all of my three girls because this was "the place" to go for that kind of return back to school shopping.  All of the kids at school wanted bags from this sporting goods store.  If you raise children, back to school fashion is very important.  This was the place to fit that bill correctly.  This sporting goods store used to carry some great looking specialty shoes in its separate fashion-conscious clothing department.  This is where all of the 'happening stuff' was offered.  I remember going into this store to visit with my business owner friends when they were so busy employing several floor staff members.  One employee would be back in the office doing the books.  She would be receiving the products, posting the invoices, printing the sale labels and charting the expenses, payroll and accounting.  She worked for these guys for almost 25 years.  I remember how some of their prime youth customers who were the most active sports enthusiasts became their part time employees helping these two owners develop their growing business model.  Some of their best skateboarders, skiers and mountain climbers worked part time on the showroom floor of the store.  They tagged the new merchandise, displayed it and wore it to show how it appeared.  They waxed the customers boards, did the routine repairs in the product shop and provided the customization each customer requested.  It used to be a 'happening' place.

Sometimes when I would stop by to visit my friends, who owned the business, they were jammed busy with all of the direction work they were spinning to get done.  There was very little quiet time in that shop.  The phone was always ringing to handle the many things that were scheduled, ordered, shipped, returned, and managed.  Ski events needed managed.  Bus trips were always happening.  Lessons classes were being filled.  Training team sports were being organized.  Meetings were being scheduled and produced.  They even used to manage a quarterly sports fashion show.  This shop was busy.  The owners were able to fill their days with plenty of work.  My visiting time was limited.

One of the activities we shared was golf.  Every once in awhile the owners and I would go out to shoot a round of golf.  We had some great fun.  They actually played some pretty good golf.  I was not as particular about my choice of clubs on every shot.  However, they always scored better than I.  We had a lot of fun chatting about life and business on those days.  One thing is for sure, the founder was the one with the business mind.  He was the one who would actually write the business plan.  He was the one who would come up with the many ideas.  He was the one who never got excited about what was going wrong.  He was the one with the most pleasing personality.  He was the one who prepared the best meals on the white water rafting trips.  When you went with the boss, you got first class treatment...always.  The truth, he is the one who built up this model to become the hot and happening place it eventually grew to become.  The founder had the right kind of dream, vision and drive.  His chosen partner was the mechanical side.

Every business needs a solid promoter.  Small business is all about promote, promote and promote.  If you have one of these people on board, good for you.  If you do not have one of these people on board, go find one.  They will be worth their weight in gold.  On the other hand, every business needs someone who stays firmly placed next to the disciplines of the mechanical side.  Someone needs to make certain all of the products get properly tagged before they reach the sales display floor...no exceptions.  Good tracking, good inventory controls, good recordings and excellent books.  The backside of the business needs to run perfectly.  Every possible discount must be realized.  None will ever get by a great back office leader.  The founders partner was that guy.  They were a good team.  They had a great business model.

Now the sign on the storefront says going out of business!  What happened?  As you might guess, when I bumped into the partner of that model he described how the economy finally took him down.  He bought out the founder several years ago.  The founder retired in another city far away.  The founder was also smart enough to make his partner use a real bank to buy him out.  The founder did not carry the papers of the business sale to his partner so he will not need to deal with the residual costs of this model going out of business.  I always thought of him as a smart guy.  Now I know he is a smart guy.  Take a major tip here owners!  Sell it clean if you sell it.  Otherwise, you might get it all back very broken.  Just a tip.

Here's what happened.

Make Sure Your Business Has A Good Imagination

How important is your imagination?  Of the principles that make up a business owners key components for producing the qualities of success, imagination is truly one of the most important components to practice.  Although so many key qualities are required to help an owner find success, having a good imagination works wonders.

I work with a lot of business leaders who fail to possess any imaginative qualities.  They operate their business models with a very sterile approach.  They also do not win very often.  They struggle to find out how to help their business models produce some excitement for their customers to see.  Remember, customers need to be entertained.  They may tell you they do not need to be entertained, but their consuming actions do not support those descriptions.  Customers spend more when they feel better about how they spend.  Logic does not always win the buying battle.  Feeling good will dominate how consumers spend.  Your improved imagination will work wonders in helping your customers feel better about how they spend money in your business environment.

The past couple of decades have been filled with a lot of great business advice.  One of the main themes that has been approached heavily during these times of good advice is the one that describes how important it is to provide your customers with a good experience.  The 'experience' your customers witness has been strongly evaluated.  There are two sides to the 'experience' equation that flips the consumer coins.  On one side of the improved 'experience' coin is the art of practicing error-free transactions.  This side of the consumer coin includes the art of making sure your business model does what it says it will do and that it does those things very well.  When the consumer flips their coin to decide how well your business model performs for them, your model better at least land on this side of the coin well.  Your model needs to be able to have good execution land present on one of the sides of that flipped coin.  The other side, if it lands upwards when flipped, needs to make sure the customer sees how good your business imagination delivered what they feel good about seeing.  Your success will hinge greatly upon how well your coin performs both of these sides.

If given a competitive choice, your customers will flip the coin most often that carries both sides of their purchasing desires.  Your customers want to be served correctly, efficiently, respectfully and properly.  That is one side of that flipped consumer coin.  The other side of that flipped coin is the side that helps your customer feel good about where they did their business.  How they feel about where they go is as important as making sure their transactions were handled correctly.  If given a choice, customers will honor the business models most that make sure both sides of the coin are present when flipped.  The models that work harder to include both concepts on each side of that consumer coin will be the business models who win the most.  Hands down.

Today, we are not going to hammer how important it is to make sure your business mistakes get eliminated from the consumer view.  That is a subject all by itself.  Today, we need to make sure we understand how important having a great imagination is to the things we need to do to make sure our business model provides this wonderful service to its consumer base.  Having a great imagination is vital to winning big, long term.  It is one of the top seventeen principles to business success.  Imagination.  Get good at it.  Make sure your business has a good imagination.

Business Challenges Sometimes Need A New Perspective.

It is time to travel again.  I hit the trail to go visit a close friend who is having some serious surgery.  He is the million dollar miracle man.  We met this new couple after they moved into our region about three years ago.  My wife and his wife are actually the closer friends.  Both women exercise a few times a week and they spend at least once each week doing their own Bible study together.  They also schedule shopping trips they enjoy.  The ladies met two years ago.  Her husband and I have become friends through their connection.  He works in a dangerous job that includes heavy construction inside the halls of our federal dam systems.  He has traveled around the west coast when certain heavy repair projects are designed and scheduled for particular dams.  Our home town has one of those dams currently scheduled with one of those heavy maintenance jobs right now.  This is how these folks found their way to move into our area.  They moved to our area about three years ago and we met them about a year after they were here.  We get together once in awhile to have dinner, sit by the outdoor fire pit to chat about life or watch a movie here and there.  It has become an occasional friendship.

Last year he was injured on the job, very seriously.  He actually passed away a couple of times during the transportation process and surgery work in the initial recovery effort.  It was a tragic period of time for his wife and family.  He suffered greatly from the accident.  His current recovery has been absolutely remarkable.  He describes how his medical expenses have exceeded the million dollar mark already.  He is a paraplegic.  His internal organs were crushed in the accident as well.  It is nothing short of a miracle that he is still alive and well.  He has some continuing serious health issues but overall, has learned how to walk again, aided.  He even drives his car.  It is amazing stuff to watch his recovery and especially his will.  His will is off the charts.  He is one very determined person.  He often gives my life a new perspective.

We are traveling because we are visiting them in another major city.  He had received some more incredible surgery work.  They are rebuilding his intestinal region.  They also removed a complicated hernia that could never be removed because his internal tissues, after the accident, were not strong enough to handle the surgery work.  The current surgery stuff they performed yesterday was complicated and risky work.  His body took the work very hard.  We have not been able to go see him in recovery, yet.  We hope he recovers well enough today so we can see him.

His wife has become very strong.  Their lives have been changed forever.  We have watched them grow from one set of people to a completely different set of people.  These are the same people we met two years ago.  They have become two examples of two people who have learned how to take a whole new approach to this life we live.  They were forced to make some unbelievable adjustments to learn how to live in their future lives.  The work he once did, is now gone.  He is physically unable to perform that work anymore.  He has had to learn how to live with reasonable degrees of constant pain and limited mobility.  His digestive track does not work properly.  He has had to endure some very embarrassing moments.  They are part of his life now.  His wife has become his routine care giver.  She fills in to provide the duties he cannot perform.  We sit and wait to see how he recovers from this recent set of surgical moves.  The group sitting in this waiting room is somber.

I write about things that are designed to help business owners and their business leaders perform necessary improvements in their business paths.  I see things that get in their way and try to warn them of the potentials for future demise.  In many cases, I have walked the wrong trail as my source of evidence.  I encourage the owners to consider doing the right things first.  I know they read and see what things I write.  I try to encourage owners to avoid doing the wrong things first.  I want them to win more than they lose.  Winning is so much more fun.

I am blessed to be able to leave my home, travel comfortably to another area and sit and wait for a friend to recover.  I am blessed to be able to be in a life position to be able to offer this kind of friendship to someone who could use it right now.  I have challenges running parallel in my life, too.  I am not without my own mountains to climb.  Every business owner faces these kinds of troubling things.  Mountains are placed on our paths of travel.  Business ownership comes with more of them than we could ever describe.  Sometimes the challenges we face in our business world seem out of control and very big.  As I sit waiting in this little room, I do not see my challenges as large as they were yesterday.  All of the sudden, they seem miniature in size when compared to the ones others are digging to manage.  I will take my mountains over these ugly challenges any day.  My wrecks are minor details in my life of travel.  My friend is facing a major crash.  His body is fighting for its life.

Business challenges sometimes need a new perspective.