Building reccession resistant small business : Part - III

Innovation is denoted as a fundamental trait on entrepreneurs. However, it is also seen as a byproduct of practicing creative disciplines, in some or other forms .The ability to govern ourselves and channelise our energies in creative direction will lead to building up innovative ideas in due course of time. The small business has to focus more on governing internal factors then on governing external situation in bringing changes, which could positively resist recession. The team and the entrepreneur plays a big role on differentiation the small business by practicing innovation, in every range of activities. With the growth of Science and Technology humanity is more aligned to govern the nature , then to govern themselves . This creates an essential misbalance in the harmony of inside and outside realities . We pretend to be more comfortable with outside realities then inner realities . Small business could not afford this kind of mistake . Though present financial situations shows that even big business and financial institution could not afford to do so. More safe side strategy for the small business, would be where entrepreneur changes himself first, to provoke change in the people around him . Later he could also transmit this changes to his supplier and customer . There is no better way to have sustainable change other than one, which starts from an individual and moves slowly, and gently towards the collective. Moving from self governance to corporate governance is the path which would prevent any form of personal and organizational recession to happen . This is more inexpensive and better way to handle recession in comparison to creating debt cycles and worsening financial situations.

Building Reccession Resistant Small Business - Part II

The practical equivalent of abundant thinking is creativity . A person whose pattern of thinking is always engrossed with scarcity, has hard time to use his creative abilities . It is very important for small business owner, to have creative capital , who might be already scarced with financial capital . Infact , innovation and finding out new and efficient ways to deal with the pressure of recession, opens new business avenues for small business owners .

The process of innovation is referred as very disruptive . So the structural approach might not be so good to bring out the best form of innovation from people . Any recession, be it personal, organizational or family, has a very unstructured approach, which forces people to think differently. That is how some small business are able to take advantage, of the condition of recession, with smart application of intelligence and talent .

We can see this happened earlier . When Y2k surfaced, some of the people forecasted about the end of the road of software industry and going back to manual processes . It never happened that way , which we can see now. On the contrary some smart Indian companies really reaped benefit of the Y2k problem and turned themsellves to a global software major .

We can understand that innovation is the key on handling recession . We had to think differently about our businesses and life and then we can bring something so new and different that every Small Business Owners (SBO) could come out from the recesion with flying colours.

Building Reccession Resistant Small Business - Part I

Last couple of months , the mainstream media is continuously bombarding with words like recession, foreclosures , credit crunch ,rising food prices, share market fall , financial crisis . It is successful to build a mental state of 'fear' on recession globally . The media have even walked ahead and started comparing with the patterns of great depression in 1930 . They may be right and they can be wrong also . But , what is remarkable is the kind of negative sentiment of scarcity it has created in last few months . All these years we have been hearing that the natural resources are scarce . Now we have reached in collective mental state , where even the monetary resources around the world is scarce. It proves the fact that when we start thinking scarcity , we add more to block of scarcity . One of my friend , was telling me that in last 2 weeks he is not trying to look at newspaper and TV , and pulling himself hard to concentrate on the project where he could make a difference. I think ,it is the most wise thing to do , to prevent the economic reccession to take the shape of personal reccesion.

I think recession is a testing time of mental approaches. Often when a recession comes in a macro economic level , it gets converted into organizational and individual level very fast . I was a part of dotcom industry when it was hit by recession in 2001 . Suddenly, every customer of our organization , was scared about us, who were buying different line of web consultancy support . Though the kind of a recession which we are having at that point of time, was a correction of the inflated valuation which was associated with dot com industry . It has nothing to do with incorporating Internet as a part of Corporate strategy to reach out different lines of customer base , which we are offering to the market at that point of time . Yet , we are badly hit .

I know from my personal experience, that it was hard to call an motivated team member, and tell him about the pay cuts which is going to happen from next month . It created such a negative energy all around the team. I continued observing how the recession in the organisational level , is getting circulated in personal level . There were no longer training camps and extended group discussion where we felt a common bonding , about how the organisation and the project we are doing, was important to us .

Often ,organisation in the time of reccesion ,takes a very hard approach towards thier tangibles . It is the most smart thing to do . But when the tangibles like money get scarce , it had to meet up by intangibles , like time and good advise that the organisational motivation stays intact . It is this which makes a difference between a sustainable business and unsustainable one .

There is also a need of changing our mental approaches from scarcity to abundance . Recession is a testing time for of our collective mental attitude towards scarcity . If we collectively think , something is scarce, it has multiplier effect, and then we see everything around is scarce . Our collective mind has a enormous power, to turn a thought which is bombared by mainstream media into a collective thinking pattern . So , the modern media and global connectivity has a huge negative multiplier effect , which will definitly add on to the reality of the global reccession .

That's to build reccession resistance the individuals and institution has to nurture the thoughts of prosperity and abundance and realise that universe is abundant . Infact ,to take a more practicle example we have to look at the our body and the different organism which functions in the body. Could they be valued in reference to money ? As says mastercard ad ... ' which I liked very much ' there is certain things which money can't buy' - it can't buy a starry night , it can't buy true love , it can't buy your exact body.

We have to understand that reccession is a mental approach . Unfortunately ,our economic theories are based on this mental approach . The fundamentals of economic understanding is based on scarcity . We have to raise questions about the validity of these fundamentals ,otherwise the world can never get out from the trap of economic reccesion , though the nature is always abundant . There is requirement of new theories which is based on the ideas of abundant thinking .

( To be continued ..)