Perception May Be 100%, But Is It Accurate?

Let's Think About The Consumer's Perspective?

Clever but legal monetary policies, layered movements of financial derivatives, creative accounting and unique business deals all come into play in a tough world economy.  Business leaders work overtime developing ways to protect their current financial interests.  They work overtime creating new ways to expand their opportunities to protect the money they currently manage.  As a result, protection policies surface at high rates of speed.  Every business 'fort' seems bent out of shape trying to find ways to protect what it has.  In all of this effort, things are not always as they seem.

Sometimes the overtime work to protect the funds a business manages becomes a silent obsession.  It creeps up into the management world without notice.  Before too long, the business decision-makers find the bulk of their monetary work surrounded by policies and exercises that include a long list of creative financing techniques.  Pick up any recent issue of the Wall Street Journal and take the time to open the pages to count the number of articles written that describe some occurrence of illegal, illicit or wrongful business process being reported.  Business publications on every newsstand are completely littered these days with reports of illegal creative financial business efforts.  The Wall Street Journal is not alone.  Bloomberg, Time, Fortune and many others...you name it they all have filled their internal pages reporting the illicit movement of money matters.

In one single Wall Street Journal issue I counted 38 articles written to report stories of illegal, illicit or wrongful financial activities of companies, leaders and officials.  Thirty eight articles describing what went wrong!  Thirty eight articles are written to describe who did what wrong to which group.  With a deeper review, in all of those articles it could be easily described how those business leaders worked hard to center their efforts on the subject of protecting their wealth.  In many business cases, protection policies work harder than growth policies.  Maybe that is why growth has become so hard to develop.  Maybe the decision-makers are spending too much time working on protection efforts and not enough time on innovation and consumer growth.  Maybe?

The level of illicit corporate policy movements may not be any larger than it was thirty years ago, but somehow I doubt it.  I recognize we have always had illicit monetary policies occur in the word of business long since before the day Christ walked this earth.  However, I doubt we have been able to be as heavily and personally affected by as much as we are in this particular day and age.  Levels of corporate wrongdoings committed today have fallen into my personal checkbook and daily life.  There are not many in the masses that are not negatively impacted by these illicit activities some corporate policy makers are dishing out.  The 'run' on wrongdoings is rising higher with each passing decade.  

In fact, just today the Wall Street Journal on the cover reports articles of distortion, crackdowns, leverage efforts, pardons and industry violations of consumer trust.  These are articles reporting how business has become the center of practicing unclean and unhealthy monetary fundamentals.  The world of business is layered in this kind of 'off-handed' activity.  That is why these publications report so many stories that surround these efforts of wrongdoings.

Things are not always as they seem.  The perception may be that corporate policies are trying to do well, but the public results are not buying that effort.  Too many business models hit the front page about back room deals and protective decisions that ignore the best interest of the consumer.  Corporate belief may actually think they are somehow working extra hard on winning the war for protecting their business strength.  However, that perception may not be as accurate as they would like to believe.  Many business leaders may be carrying the perception, 100%, that they are hired to work out how to protect the wealth their current business process is trying to maintain.  However, the consumer may be deeply considering a completely separate view.  The consumer may be arming their own buying attacks.  The consumer is producing a much more careful approach to the buying process they once performed so freely.  They trust no one, no more.

Here's the deal.  The consumer is having a tough time buying well without feeling the squeeze of life.  The consumer is losing confidence.  The consumer is noticing how it is becoming more difficult to win.  The levels of satisfaction felt by the consumer are beginning to take its long term toll.  And as a buyer, they are heading towards the 'don't care' attitude.  It is slowly becoming a process that hovers over the idea that surrounds the all for one, and one for all mentality.  Consumers are panning their buying process with a much more careful eye.  They are not afraid to sue, tweet, whistle-blow or picket.  The consumer is arriving near the level of buying procedures that haunts the halls of disgust and distrust.  They enter their world of buying with a much more careful eye.  In many cases, as they should.

There has never been a time when the phrase 'buyers beware' has become so true.  Just take a simple look at the protection of wealth policies in the drug and prescription industry, the financial institutions, the investment industry, the housing industry, the medical industry, add to them the permission of the technology wars for control and corporate dominance, the foreign policies of unfair and unhealthy tariffs, financial protection mandated by the government and its policies to force added monetary mandates onto the backs of consumers who are continually being asked to shoulder this overwhelming list of illicit burdens.  The consumer is running out of gas trying to keep up.  Business has created its own monster.  We have developed a monster that is likely devouring the limbs of our consumer.

Perception may be 100% in the corporate world.  Protection of wealth may be the work they perceive they need to do...but is it accurate?

Page two.

Immediate Versus Delayed Gratification

When I get hungry, I need to eat.  I am a diabetic.  Food sources for fuel are important to my health, sugar levels and energy production.  Therefore, when I feel that internal 'urge' to eat...I need to eat.  I have trained my body to talk to me about fuel.  Immediate gratification must be closely linked to my 'urge' that signifies fuel needs.  My body has been trained to signal for fuel.  I usually carry along some appropriate food sources to help meet those needs when I travel beyond my regular feeding time slots.

If I miss feeding that 'urge' to eat...my satisfaction opportunity is not exactly lost, however.  I am not usually the kind of diabetic that runs dangerously high or carelessly low on my sugar counts.  My fluctuations vary at small degrees above or below where my sugar levels need to remain.  As a result, when the 'urge' to eat arrives I can often delay my food fuel intake for a little while and not be in danger.  In some way I have been able to arrest my diabetes and balance that effort to respect how gratification works in my food desires.  I find good fuel when my 'urges' come knocking.  I regulate consuming foods my body cannot use.

Gratification can be managed.  Furthermore, gratification should be managed.  As a diabetic, my daughter sent me a Kindle book titled "Know Your Numbers."  She works in the medical field.  Wow, what a great read.  It was a well-written book that has helped me to improve how I manage my diabetes much better.  The management of my diabetes surrounds many issues that relate to the balance of gratification.  To win at the management game of any endeavor means to learn how to balance the urges that fly about our lives.  We all want to be gratified.  That urge is perpetual.  We must learn how to manage it.

Why I have diabetes to deal with is not my concern.  My main concern is to learn how to manage a challenge well when it arrives.  In this case, the challenge happens to be diabetes.  Diabetes arrives and begins to dominate the regular 'urge' to hack down a bag of M & M's.  A lot of good management comes from knowing how to arrest the gratification process.  Success usually surrounds those who manage gratification much better than most of those who are faced with the similar urges and circumstances yet fail to arrest those fleeting 'urges'.  The war to success often times becomes the one fought between the urges of immediate gratification versus those of delayed gratification.

Immediate gratification can take control of many success opportunities and diverts their paths away from where we ultimately want them to arrive.  Delayed gratification seems too slow for most of us to wait.  The human being wants a much faster set of good results.  Most of us are impatient souls.  We thrive for immediate results.  We want it now...not later.

Business success works in exactly the same way.  Those who learn the art of managing gratification will likely be the same ones who will win in business more often.  If there ever was a serious category where delayed gratification works wonders, it is in business.  Business comes completely packaged with thousands of connections to delayed gratification procedures.  Everything seems to move in slow motion.  This is not weird.  It is normal.

If you lead a small business and you have been at it for awhile you will come to recognize how true delayed gratification can become.  It completely surrounds the game of business, does it not?  Every good business leader eventually comes to the realization that delayed gratification is a permanent fixture in the life of business management.  Rewards seem very slow to arrive.

How do we learn the art of managing immediate versus delayed gratification?  How can hacking down a full bag of M & M's destroy how my business bottom line produces an improved set of results?  How are the two linked?  One one hand is the slamming of M & M's, on the other hand is my business process.  How do those two events clash?

Page two.

Marketing: The Death of Begging.

The only time a desperation sale works is when it is real.  When the business is truly going out of business, that sale is real.  That is usually when the bargains are true and the discounts are realistically slashed deep.  In a going out of business sale there is usually no care given to the margins of profit anymore.  All that remains for that failing business to do is to get rid of the inventory quickly before it becomes permanently owned.  That is why this kind of desperation sale works.  The consumer finally knows that the prices are the lowest they will see.  The owner wants to get rid of the stuff.

Desperation sales work well to move a lot of goods because the customer gets their last chance to benefit well.  Customers do not go to desperation sales to support or try to save the dying business.  They go to a desperation sale because they want to get a good deal.  That's it.

Customers are more interested in taking care of themselves than they are for trying to help out a dying business model.  This has always been the truth for how customers move.  The bulk of their buying behavior is a self serving list of activities the consumer performs.  This is not a serious revelation.  Most business owners completely see and understand this consumer motion.  Customers will do what it takes to take care of themselves.  This is not all bad news, however.  What it is for sure becomes the most important pattern the business owner should always try to honor in their marketing ways.  Consumers support self.  Stick to this fact when the marketing plan rolls out.  Make sure the marketing plan recognizes that the consumer wants to win.

Saving your business does not mean I win.  It means you won.  Consumers clearly get this.

The mind of the consumer is a fickle thing.  I am a consumer.  I know.  My mind can become very fickle at times.  I buy what I want to buy and I shop where I want to shop.  However, my mind is triggered by things that I have come to like.  That makes me vulnerable to some actions of patterns that become my way of preference to choose.  I become attracted to doing some things in the ways I prefer to have them done.  My buying patterns reflect those desires.  That is exactly how everyone else shops and buys.  We all have our patterns of preference.  Those patterns of buying preferences dominate where we go, how we do it and when we purchase what we purchase.  All of us are consumers.  We have our preference patterns.

Did you know what I discovered?  I discovered that we can change up how we shop and how we buy.  We do it all of the time.  Even though we have strong preferences in how we shop and buy, we can alter those preferences in a flash and do some new patterns of buying completely out of our character of habits.  We can change it up and buy in a brand new way.  Something triggers that kind of change.  We all have done this kind of pattern.  We can switch it up.  That is one of the ways we become so fickle as buyers for the business thinkers to know.  Business thinkers work overtime trying to figure us out.  Then we switch it up a little bit on them.  That is when they must go back to the drawing boards.

Consumers have the ability to practice their fickle ways, and they do.  It is something I have discovered.

Did you know what else I discovered?  As fickle as consumers can become, they do not usually share their money with panhandlers and beggars.  Once in a long while, someone hands a beggar some money, usually small change or some small 'left-over' amounts.  That's it.  Consumers do not care to have their spending opportunities limited by giving away what they do not want to give away.  Most consumers do not see that process as a win.  They did not go shopping to lose.  Most keep what they have and rarely let it go to someone who tries to beg it away from them.  Don't believe me?  Just go sit in a mall parking lot and watch as thousands of consumers go back and forth into the stores and count how many will actually stop to give small amounts away to a beggar.  Maybe one in a thousand.  I have done this survey.  It is a lot less than you might think.
 
So why do business owners resort to begging?  Many business models do just that.  They beg for business.  They use their marketing efforts to approach the consumer with patterns that represent a way of begging.  They arrange their 'marketing plea' to encourage the consumer to buy around some principle of thought.  They play the consciousness card with the mind of the consumer.  They beg for the support of those kinds of thoughts.  Why do business owners tend to resort to marketing their sales in a panhandling way?  Why do they use the consumers consciousness to beg for trade?  Consumers do not like it.  And when they honor it, it is usually done with the 'left over' change.  We can prove that pattern.  So why do some business models fall for this kind of technique?  Why do they believe it will work?  Let's review some examples and reasons.

Page two.

Nike, Flipping The Hostage Coin?

A Great Business Example!

OK, you have billions of dollars in cash reserves. (Literally and truly.)  You have a very nasty recession that seems to ignore recovery.  You have some foreign production problems happening in your manufacturing process that can easily get out of your control.  You have media not treating you as much like the darling you once were pleasantly coddled.  The business world around your location is suffering hard times just as well.  Small business is doing all that it can do to hang on.  Neighborhood downtown independent businesses are slowly disappearing.  Some of those downtown businesses just simply cannot survive these tough times.  So what do you decide to do?  If you are Nike, you expand.  You develop an expansion plan to serve your growth with added production.  You budget millions to add more.

Nike has become very successful.  That is why it has huge cash reserves.  I have no challenge with Nike doing well.  That is why I advise business leaders to improve what they do for a living.  We all want to do well.  I get that.  Hear, hear...toast it up...and congrats to Nike.  Other struggling business leaders should take notes.  Do more like what the winners do, then do less stuff our losing ways produce.  It is simple stuff. It is usually the mind that is difficult.  Nike somehow got over that hurdle.

That brings us to the hostage coin.  Nike has announced it wants to expand.  It wants to develop and expand its operations.  Let me see?  Did I just read 38 related but separate articles yesterday in the Wall Street Journal that covered the subject of a failing recession for almost everybody?  Maybe Nike is not reading that stuff?  Maybe Nike is living on a different planet?  Oh, that's right!  When economic times get tough consumers flock to the stores to purchase high dollar sports shoes!  Right?  Not!  Then how do they do it?

People...Nike is not in the shoe sport business!  Nike is not in the shoe business anymore than McDonald's is in the hamburger business.  You see, Ray Kroc was in the commercial property rental business.  All he wanted to do was make sure his McDonald's operators could win their business war while working hard in their little hamburger stores so he could collect the monthly rent.  Call them loans or lease agreements, it still amounts to a monthly rent.

Ray wanted 5200 rent checks of $1,500 per month to appear in his account and that those checks cleared their bank when they were drawn.  That happens to be only $7.8 million dollars of "non-employee'/"non-inventory"/"immediately collectible" funds hitting your account each month.  Pretty much "keep" money.  I wonder if you could do well with that kind of recession activity?  No payroll and benefit account payable obligations, no suppliers waiting to factor payments for products delivered and no accounts receivables to wait out their normal delay spin to finally come home.  This is looking better all the time.  Ray Kroc developed a great business concept.  Tip: does your business look like this one?  If not, why not?

Nike is modeled in the same way McDonald's is modeled.  Nike is in the rental business.  They lease their reputation.  A lease is just another way of saying, rent.  Apparently, it is huge and profitable to do that.

For example, currently there is an economic corporate positioning war going on to capture who will dominate the T.V. business in your home.  Here are some of the players fighting to capture your viewing habits.  Comcast, Google, Verizon, Disney, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple, Samsung, Visio, Netflix, Red Box, and the long list goes on and on and on.  Do you think television viewing is in the cross-hairs of corporate America's current investment positioning efforts?  Ya' think?  Currently, the number one rated spot on television viewing is sports programming!  Now you see why Nike does so well!  It ain't about shoes!  It is all about the marketing of the logo and its lease agreements.  How is your business model designed?  Does it look for more lease agreements?  Why not?  That seems to be where the recessionary activity seems to be playing out.  (Just some business observations.)

Nike has cash.  A ton of it.  Nike has funds.  A ton of it.  Nike can afford to build its campus expansions without any government help.  No joke.  So why are they flipping the hostage coin?  Why is Nike asking the tax payer to foot some of their development costs?  That is precisely what they are asking when they approached the State of Oregon to request a lower tax rate deal to build their expansion project.  If Nike gets a 'break' on their share, guess who is expected to pick up the missing future collections?  Have you got a mirror close by?  If you look quickly, you will be able to peek at who will pick up some of the cost of that expansion plan.  How do you look in that mirror?  Better yet, where's your cash return?  That is not exactly the kind of lease agreement I am suggesting you employ.

Why is Nike leaning on the public to capitalize some of their growth?  Why is Nike holding the State of Oregon hostage by negotiating the State for lower taxation payments before they move forward on this expansion?  There are three reasons why Nike is flipping this hostage coin.  Number one, they can.  Number two, they are smart.  Number three, our government is dumber than they are smart.  That's it.

You see, Nike knows the State needs to immediately produce new jobs.  This Nike planned expansion is reported to be able to produce a thousand new jobs.  The State needs a 1,000 more jobs.  Nike knows this.  Nike wants the State of Oregon to cut a 'lower-tax' deal before it decides to build its jobs in this State.  Hence, Nike flipped the hostage coin.

As Nike might suggest, if Oregon does not want to play, someone else will.  The fear of loss is greater than the expectation of gain...always.  Nike gets this rule fully understood.  Governments often times miss this rule.

Governments do not fully comprehend how business is done.  That is exactly why their product, government services, is so over-priced and poorly served that users like Nike can leverage that reality into exposing the fear of loss.  Nike can easily leverage the State into believing they need to come down in price to protect the movement of the services they provide.  Unfortunately, all of this is true.  Governments are way over-priced and well under-served to the point that a big business dog can leverage their way into getting better deals.  What the heck do you think a lobby does?  Governments are so over-wrought with inefficiencies and poor production results that they become subject to dealing lower cost arrangements behind closed doors because their products are so poorly supplied.  Governments are terrible business operators.  Nike is not.    

If a government was to present their services to a competitive market, with no mandates to use them solely, all of us would elect to use someone else.  They cost too much.  We would shop elsewhere.  Is that not what Nike is doing?  Sure it is.

Oregon's Governor and his representatives do not fully see this picture.  Nike does.  Oh, trust me, Nike will play out the victim cards and the I wanna' help out the economy cards like any good salesman should do...but the truth remains, they know what they are doing.
 
Do not ever forget this fact, the State is really you.  What ever the State decides to give away it must first take.  And that place they will go to take what they need to cover what they gave away will be your pocket.  Do not ever become mistaken about that part of the math equation for doing business.  It is always far more simple than the complicated spin the government leaders try to describe.  Their product is not very marketable.  Nike knows it and will hit them hard with the fear of loss they can easily deliver.  Those government leaders have left themselves with no choice but to give in.  It is much the same as a small business owner who has a customer standing at the counter asking for a better discount on an already hugely reduced product when the store is suffering to make its daily sales.  The hostage coin is flipped.

Someone gets to underwrite that sale.  Someone gets to underwrite that tax-reduction deal.  All that remains is for you to expect to pay slightly more personal taxes to cover the amount of the discount given to Nike.  Don't worry, your life will be better off for the increased jobs.  That is how the hostage coin works.  At least, that is how it will ultimately spin out its justification.  Get it?  

Page two.

It's Natural, We Self-Fulfill Our Human Tendencies.

No Crystal Ball Here, Just Good Integrity.

Business leaders are human beings, too.  Business leaders tend to do what other people do.  Business leaders are not so completely different...away from behaving like non-business thinkers.  At least, not all of the time.  In fact, most business leaders actually walk this world in very much the same way as non-business people do.  The human condition is often times very much the same.

Even the great ones have similar tendencies that make them seem very much the same as everyone else.  You have heard the phrase, "They put their pants on one leg at a time, the same way everyone else does."

Steve Jobs, for example, was naturally afraid of facing his early signals of cancer.  As a result, he delayed getting them checked out properly in the earlier stages.  Even though he had the economic means and a higher access to better care he failed like many normal people fail to find earlier methods of preventive care.  As a result, his natural tendencies of fear took over the wheel of charge and reacted well too late to prevent his life from being taken over by a deadly disease.  A somewhat preventable process was avoided.  Once again the normal pattern to allow natural tendencies ruled out the use of higher levels of leadership courage.

Tiger Woods, President Bill Clinton, Bernard Madoff, Alan Greenspan, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Paul McCartney and thousands more have become great business leaders in their own right who have permitted their human tendencies to take control of their leadership wheel.  Business leaders are human beings, first.  Then once human they begin to do their business work.  Business leaders are not above the rest of the crowd in the human condition.  In the end they are exactly the same as everyone else, human beings.      

Business leaders and the rest of the people in this world have a tendency to operate much in the same way.  Their human tendencies are as similar as anyone might expect.  The mere fact that those human tendencies are similar is often times the reason why so many business leaders fail to produce higher levels of success.  The human tendencies we produce can often times create lines of limits to our potential for success.  Failure can often come from the normal human conditions found in the business leader.  It becomes natural for the business leader to behave exactly the way they believe they should behave.  They allow their human tendencies to take over their leadership responsibilities.  They do what comes natural.

As a result, if something is too risky to introduce, or to perform well, their normal human tendencies take over and they avoid taking that risk.  Instead, they do what comes natural.  They act in the easy way.  And it is in this fashion that sometimes the business leader becomes too normal to support taking higher risks to produce greater success.  It is natural.  They do what comes natural, like everyone else.

Alan Greenspan is a perfect example of how the human condition, how our natural tendencies can take us down.  Even though he quietly escaped the public scrutiny of the disappointment expressed by Americans for the economic mess they have recently had to endure, his drive to be recognized as a great monetary policy maker went underground.  His goal to be greatly recognized failed.  As circumstances unfolded, that turns out to become very good news for him.  In the end, he escaped becoming one of the goats of the destruction.

As Greenspan was preparing his exit from the office he held he wanted so badly to go out with a memorable bang that would place his name in the lights of financial stardom.  Alan Greenspan wanted to be recognized as one of the 'greats' in the world of financial control.  Before he left the office as the Federal Reserve Czar, he arranged to produce and print more money to feed lower interest rates that he had hoped would spur an increase in potential economic growth that could be remembered for years beyond his time in office.

Unfortunately, his desire to become famous ran larger than his internal indications that something might be apt to go terribly wrong.  During a time when the investing world had developed new and unusual financial derivatives and complicated instruments; all of them designed to shift, leverage and run when the wholesale movement they created occurred.  Greenspan then infused too much new 'sub-supported' money into the economy that drove interest rates far too low to consequently support the wholesale activity that was beginning to occur.  This effect triggered the unraveling of the financial collapse.  The bubble was pricked!  As a result, the consumer could not figure out how to properly use the financial instruments introduced into the wholesale shifting of the money markets.  This consumer misunderstanding produced nothing in tangible and real products that were so desperately needed in order to help move the economy upward.  All it actually produced was the shifting of already capitalized money movements, turned into a new wholesale industry that found its way feeding on itself.  Consumers ran away.  Consumers could not figure out how they factored into this corporate plan to increase profits.  Hence, financial collapse.  This happens to be an economic lesson experts still have not figured out.  Consumers drive the end game...not the investors.  Smart people always seem to miss this component.  

Greenspan admits that in printing new money to eventually infuse into the markets during the time when complicated financial instruments were running out of check, might very well become the only real challenge experienced by the lipid rules of the housing and financial industries governing the paper flow of the mortgage and investment bubble.  Even so, with his own mindful self-warnings, he wanted so much to place his name above everyone else in that growth potential.  His natural tendencies took over.  He arranged our economic policies to work their ways into feeding the worst financial disaster this country has ever seen.  Consequently disrupting an already fragile world economy.  His business leadership knew better.  His natural tendencies took over.  His desire to be big won over his unique knowledge to know better.

Business leaders often times work their incredible magic in very wrong ways.  They want to succeed so badly that they often times get all caught up with their tendencies to win.  They become very much the same as you and I.  They work their way through life with a bent towards natural things.  They self-fulfill their human tendencies.  With that urge in mind, they find a way to destroy what they built.

Page two.

Time To Run Forward Or Time To Retreat?

Something To Consider Strongly!

The level of uncertainty in the business world is abnormally high.  There is no doubt about the uncertainty.  Even the giants of the business world are discussing various subjects of how to prevent the future of their potential business death.  Microsoft is entertaining all of the discussions about their future demise, regardless of their current size.  The discussion is very real stuff.  It flops alive on the pages of Fortune magazine, Businessweek and the Wall Street Journal.  It also has some telling points.  Who would have guessed it?

Amazon and Facebook circle up the headlines here and there about how they plan to prevent failure in the long run.  Additionally, business staples like Wonder Bread, Hewlett Packard, Motorola, Panasonic, Sears, Kmart, Olive Garden, Citibank and J.C. Penney's all have economic pictures that flirt heavily with ruined profits...some with deadly results.  For example, Google now owns Motorola that saved it from definite doom and is now pawning it off to the next best bidder.  Google purchased Motorola for some of its proprietary assets and is now willing to take a 'plus' billion dollar loss to get rid of the stripped-down version.  Google kept some patent rights and technological components then peeled them off to sell the remaining carcass to some scavenger who might see value in that kind of deal.  As it appears, Motorola is all but dead. It is all becoming very amazing.

Hundreds of strong business models are busy rearranging economic strategies.  Many are moving to borrow and secure bond developments that will help them to fund cash initiatives, like payroll and dividend distributions.  It has become some very crazy stuff.  The definite and extreme rush to bonds has devalued the returns once witnessed in that market.  In some areas of the economy, supply and demand still works.  The returns to investors of bonds are not as attractive as they once were.  Wall Street headlines are now warning bond investors to take flight, run away.  It is a 'catch-twenty-two' proposition.

The landscape for continuing profitably in the business world is risky stuff.  Maybe there are just too many financial creations, too many derivatives developed to mask what is truly going on.  Just take a serious glance around the ownership tables.  The act of borrowing time, fluffing up cash flow and stretching out payments to various investors, partners and time extensions has become the three legs of the current business model.  Even the greed we see in the corporate world is centered and ballooned by the extreme fear that all will be lost, sooner or later.  The premise surrounding the driving greed easily points to the idea that since we may go down soon, I am at least getting mine.  People, this is the core of the truth.  These are the roots to the tree we climb above ground.  Get real.  It is insane.  It is a complex world filled with very smart business leaders destined to playing this kind of game harder every single day.  What the heck!?

Keeping up with the wind of economic change is tough business.  I read almost three hours each day trying to develop a clearer picture of what tomorrow may bring.  I have to admit, it is very confusing stuff.  The economic landscape is just about as complex as the circuit boards we produce in the labs of high tech companies.  It is not the work of simple minds, simple procedures and easy fixings.  It is complex stuff.

To any small business owner, all of this information is just too overwhelming to digest.  Their own little worlds of buying and selling business activities has plenty of bumps in their own roads to recovery.  All of that other complex stuff is just added weight.  The small time business owners do not have the current strength to carry any more loads.  Enough is enough.

So we come to the real question for small business, what do we do next?

Is it time to run forward or time to retreat?

Page two.