What Is the Key Skill for Every Successful Business Person
You are right to be skeptical as soon as somebody argues that they hold the key to unconditional success and they would be happy to share it with you. In business or in life, there are rarely silver bullet solutions, which is not to say that there are no clear paths to great results or big money. The contrary is true – once you hit the right button with your service or product, you are likely to win the jackpot with customers. The problem is that more often that not it does not happen as a result of something that can be easily transferred to other people. Self-help and business guide books might include tonnes of useful advice, but no amount of reading guarantees achieving the same effects as they authors did, if they really did. The reality is simply too complex to be captured in a single snippet of advice. But it would also be wrong to give up trying to formulate some sort of ultimate lesson for our times for business and for life. Motivational speakers are a great group to reach out to since they tend to have uncanny talent for synthesizing this kind of information and delivering it with a passion,
In one HBR blog entry there is an interesting analogy that uses the image of two young sailors on a boat caught way off the shore by a violent storm. It nicely illustrates a very common position many people find themselves in nowadays. We keep plunging in situations that are largely beyond our control, emergencies and disasters of everyday life, when we have to use little information and little knowledge we have at our disposal to react. In a fast-paced, endlessly malleable world, it is imperative to refine the ability to handle such moments since they are not only increasingly frequent but also because they define the future, motivational speakers say.
Take the recent financial crisis, for example. Few could have successfully predicted it, so most organizations and individuals had to learn how to deal with its impact by freestyle improvisation. They were, if you like the analogy, caught off guard away from the shore on a rickety sailboat. Again and again, if on a smaller scale, we are faced with this kind of occurrences. What is the winning response here?
Well, seismic shifts like the financial crisis are difficult to adjust to without giving them a serious thought. And this is what most businesses and individuals need to do when they are challenged – no panic, not act on misguided instinct, but think. It is also essential to have a good look at a range of possible responses, because there are usually more than one way to go about the problem. Worrying about choosing the ideal is futile since ideals are very rare. Instead, you have to choose the optimal path and commit to it, making sure that you are ready to adjust the same way again, should a need arise.