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Continued: Harvey Mackay: If adversity strikes, best response is to be resilient
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Failure is all too common in business. Anyone who's run a business wakes up regularly with nightmares about the what-ifs.
But successful businesspeople know that if adversity strikes, they can work around it. They're resilient.
In the mid-'90s, Microsoft was dominant, and Apple Computer was sagging. Steve Jobs, who'd co-founded Apple in 1976, left in 1985 after a struggle with the board of directors. Apple struggled, too, until Jobs returned as CEO in 1997, saw the problem and established a spirit of innovation leading to the iMac, iPod, iTunes and iPhone. That's resiliency.
Tylenol controls about 35 percent of the North American pain-reliever market. But in 1982, you couldn't give it away. A psychopath put cyanide into some Tylenol capsules, causing eight deaths. Although Johnson & Johnson had done nothing wrong, the company pulled more than 31 million bottles from the shelves at a cost of $100 million. The company also offered to exchange the capsules for tablets, taking another financial hit.
Putting customer safety before profit helped restore confidence in the brand. Sales recovered. Resilient? You better believe it.
If those firms can bounce back on such a large scale, they should inspire those facing smaller challenges.
Sales slumps, production slowdowns, labor issues and changing customer preferences affect many businesses. The strong survive because they find ways to rise above the issue at hand.
You can't anticipate every possible problem, but you can resolve to face challenges as they arise. Keep your mind wide open for solutions, listen to those around and under you, reprogram your brain for success and dig in.
The last decade could have spelled disaster for envelope companies such as MackayMitchell. Fax machines, e-mail, instant messaging, online catalogs, online bill paying, the anthrax scare, 9/11, recession -- you name it -- one threat after another. We could have gone into the tank 20 times.
But we changed our business focus as necessary, cultivated new business and managed to survive and thrive. The same work hours may not apply, vacations for our employees were put on hold, wages held in check. It's not forever, but it's survival. We'd have had a hard time telling our employees that we weren't resilient enough to provide them with jobs. A lot of families depended on our flexibility, and still do. We're always looking for ways to protect against the next threat, even if we haven't identified it yet.
Just as reeds survive better than trees in strong wind, it is better to bend than to break. Companies and workers who can bend and not break have the gift of resiliency to bounce back from adversity.
Mackay's Moral: Don't let hard times turn into end times. Let them lead to your best times.
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