Unearthing Among Destruction
I haven't done it in a while, but I absolutely used to love "Freelance Cooking." Freelance cooking is when you look in the fridge, in the cupboards and pantry, and improvise a meal with what little you have. I taught myself this skill out of necessity. A long long while back, I had an unexpected financial downturn - the kind where you have to make $7.00 last five days - and at first glance, didn't seem to have much food in the house. Within a half-hour, I was eating some sort of noodle cheese salad sprinkled with something I'm not sure was officially still considered "edible food." But it was good, and I didn't get sick, so I was inspired to continue freelancing for the next several days...even after I got paid. All in all, I became better acquainted with how to make things happen in the kitchen due to a sudden and negative financial change.
In the business world, if leaders don't become versed in the equivalent of "freelance cooking," there's a fair chance that their companies won't succeed. Sudden change happens all the time, and sometimes with great severity. What leaders have to realize is that change, even if it is negative change, creates opportunities. Gary Bradt has written a great book on this subject called, The Ring in the Rubble: Dig Through Change and Find Your Next Golden Opportunity.
The opportunities presented by change are usually not clear cut. If they were, the statistics of failed business would not be so stark. Bradt "reveals the secrets to moving beyond the rubble of disruption, fear, and uncertainty that change often creates, to finding the golden ring that always lies beneath."
If you are a manager, it is absolutely your job to dig up the ring - to forge new paths that didn't exist before things went awry. Instead, a lot of manager deal with bad times by trying to get things back to normal. What they don't realize is that "normal" was probably a considerable factor in what went wrong - status quo didn't work. This is what separates good leaders from bad. A good manager would not look to past successes and strategies for answers, but would gather all possible resources, take a broad look at the market, and try to find a way to forge a new direction.
Here's what Bradt does with The Ring in the Rubble. "Each chapter delivers a powerful principle for leading change, supported by engaging real-life experiences of the author and other well-known business executives that illustrate how to put principles into action. Bradt asks penetrating questions that help you "dig deeper" and pinpoint the best ways for applying these principles to your specific change effort."
And then there are the stories, like those of Colonel Harland Sanders and the founder of Best Buy, both of whom were on the brink of devastation before they turned their distastrous setbacks into opportunities. And Sanders was a 65 year-old man at the time, so these lessons apply to all people and leaders of all ages.
If you want to get ahead of the managerial pack, you best be learning how to dig through the effects of change to find even greater opportunities - to find The Ring in the Rubble.
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