Why?

The more we look at and consider all that's taking place in our economy with increasing lay-offs and business failures, it becomes even more evident that its time to shake off some of our habitual tendencies.

Whenever we begin our approach with the status quo we assume that the existing methods are good ones, if not even great ones. But many times those methods just happen to be the ones that everyone has silently (or even loudly) agreed to.

This makes me start to question all types of things I do...Why do we email the way that we do, have meetings when we do, talk to clients as frequent/infrequent as we do? Why do we wait till clients ask us for help, have the systems in place that we do...you get the idea. Its time to poke holes in our assumptions.

We need to change things up - maybe try to have regularly scheduled and recurring meetings with your clients, suggest exact start & stop times for phone calls and meetings, let people know what you're doing when they can't reach you. It'd be great if this even reached the hallowed halls of corporate America. (Side-note: I'd love to see insurance companies giving rebates for proactive clients - clients are preventative with their health care through regular exercise, clients that do more than get their oil changed when taking care of their cars, clients that will have trees cut down to prevent storm damage to their homes, and so on.)

We all need to throw out the status quo. Work from the ground up and then evaluate where we are and where we really need to be.

[For more thoughts on this, check out a previous posting on Tried...and True?]