I participated in a group ZOOM meeting of Entrepreneurs this past week from all over North America. During part of the discussion one of the participants said, now is not the time to waste a good pandemic. There was a silence in the electronic ZOOM room of business people as this person continued.
During this time, she said, we are being tested as business people. We have been required to rethink and reapply ourselves to new ways of doing things; not with committee meetings that go on forever and ever studying endless options to be hammered out. Instead she said, we have to make decisions now, we need to act now, to impact our communities now.
Entrepreneurs are fortunate, in that we have to prove for ourselves day in and day out. This is why we, as a group do so poorly within a bureaucratic structure. It’s about ‘getting it done and getting it done now’. There is a mantra I often impatiently repeat to myself with each passing birthday: “Time is a’wasting”. So, don’t wait. Do what needs to be done; and what people need right now is predictability.
The current pandemic may have been unpredictable; and there are a lot of institutions that we thought we could depend upon that we are now discovering are not to be counted on. Individuals who we thought were leaders are turning out to be unpredictably, not leaders. Famous people who we thought had some insight into this situation don’t have any insights. Everything seems to have become unpredictable.
So, how do you respond to that? I simply asked myself, what can be predictable? And the answer is, I can be predictable. The people who make up our great team can be predictable. Our service can be predictable. The basic context of how we have created the way our office functions is based upon entrepreneurism and the choices of how we run our day to day business is decided here. So, we are going to be focused upon the same message, no matter what is happening in the world. Our goal is to provide predictability.
