What Would We Be Without Wishful Thinking?

Hey!

As I’m typing this, I should be at the Wilco concert…but 2020, you know! So I’m listening to Wilco on the radio and writing! Thus, the title! 

But I’m not really thinking about wishful thinking at all. 

Instead, I’m thinking about a conversation that Peter Drucker had with Jack Welch when Jack Welch first took over GE. 

I won’t share with you the entire story, you can find it a lot of places, but the gist of the story is that Jack Welch started out talking about how he could make GE the best company it could possibly be as he was taking over as CEO. 

Eventually, Peter Drucker steered Welch around to a question that has been sticking with me as the pandemic has continued here in the States, “If you weren’t in a business already, would you get into it now?”

The kicker, “If the answer is no, what are you going to do about it?” 

As I’ve been talking with folks around the world the last few months, I’ve had a lot of folks try and convince me that there is some magic bullet coming to fix everything and that business will get back to normal in no time at all. 

No time at all has now turned into 6 months in the US and I’m really prepared for this to drag on into the middle of 2021 here in the States, at a minimum. 

Why? 

Lack of leadership for one and the longer you let something go, the longer it takes to fix. 

But back to you. 

As you are thinking about finishing out the year as strongly as you can, let me ask you about what you’ve been thinking on during the pandemic. 

Have you thought about the way you want to relaunch your business if you had to take some time off due to shutdowns? 

Have you rethought what the value you have to offer your market? Is it the same or different? 

Have you thought about whether or not you should even be in the business you are in any longer? 

If your answers to these questions are new or different than they were before, what are you going to do about it? 

Wilco says, “What would we be without wishful thinking?”

But I’m much more practical when I ask you what are you going to do differently on Monday to make sure you are moving in the direction you want to be heading now that we are heading out of the summer and trying to make sure we gain as many positive as we can from 2020. 

Let me know! 

Dave