Men who Matter – sharing ideas and gaining perspective       

Traditionally the New Year kicks off with enthusiasm and excitement, but the picture painted of the challenges facing the automotive industry casts a shadow on festivities. The current economic climate has served to boost the negativity in the Eastern Cape. 

But here’s the reality. The economy doesn’t kill business, people do. It’s a sad fact. The brilliance of great minds — yours and your colleagues — gets dimmed, or even blocked, by the social dynamics that we unconsciously create. A small but powerful part of our brain kicks in and we tend to drop the hammer on good ideas without even knowing we’ve done it. We operate in survival mode.

The success or failure of the companies linked to the automotive industry comes down to a simple equation
E + R = O      

                                                 Event + Reaction = Outcome

 The outcome you experience is the result of how you have responded to the event. You can blame the economy, the government, your mother-in-law or your boss. But that won’t change anything. If you don’t like the outcome, change your response. If the event was the deciding factor, nobody would ever have succeeded.

 Jack Cansfield, who shares this equation in his seminars, refers to a Lexus dealership in Southern California to illustrate the point. When the gulf war broke out sales plummeted. Had the dealership continued to advertise and wait for customers to walk into their showroom, they would have gone out of business. The dealership changed their response (R) to an unexpected event (E) – the war- until they got the outcome (O) they wanted… increased sales.

 This requires a willingness to explore alternatives, see different perspectives and value new ideas. Improvement is about understanding and capturing ideas and possibilities, reformulating and restructuring those ideas into a usable form and then transforming them into actions and behaviors. All of us have the capability to generate ideas and possibilities, but we need to be operating in our thinking brains.

 Men who matter will help colleagues to ditch blaming, faultfinding and excuses and focus on motivating managers to take responsibility for the future by choosing there response – by choosing to be someone who matters!  

 Carey-Lyn Kurten is a skilled and energized facilitator who will assist you with a simple tool to stamp out negativity and improve the quality of your organizations decision making and problem solving. Contact Carey on 0832480018 or via email mila@eln.co.za

Published in Business Link Magazine Ed 47: January/Feb 2009