Five Truths in Today's Horoscope

LEO (July 23-Aug 22) "The ones who do well in business know how to tolerate the ups and downs. It won't always go smoothly, and you have to be able to sustain a certain degree of loss. Practice endurance, and in the end you'll succeed. Keep going."

That was my horoscope today in the StarPhoenix, and, today only, even if you're not a LEO, you can adopt this as your own. All businesses experience ups and downs, successes and failures, periods of growth and periods of crisis. Heck, everything in life goes up and down, and we need to learn to deal with this more effectively.

Here are five thoughts to help you handle the ups and downs of business:

1. Not all ups warrant celebration, and not all downs require intervention. We tend to take credit for successes, jump on the bandwagon, and strike up the band with every little uptick in results - the TSX is up 0.4% - hooray! Yet we also tend to blame others for faliures, jump off tall buildings, and strike out at others when our measures drop - the Dow Jones is down 45 point today - aaaarrrrggghhh! Most of the variation we see in our daily results is just the random dance of hundreds of common little factors. Calm down about it, and learn to see variation differently. The world of statistical process control gives us powerful tools for separating the wheat from the chaff, from telling us whether today's change is something significant. Learn to "tolerate the ups and downs."
2. Stick with your process. You create a long-term vision and mission statement, whip up a business strategy and operating plan, standardize the daily work for yourself and the little people, and set out on your path to success on a going forward basis. Then, after three weeks/three months/three quarters of staying the course, everybody panics because the desired change has not yet materialized. Doubts well up, blame is bandied about, and everybody frantically scrambles to figure out what they should do differently. Reorganize! Re-brand! New business cards for everyone! Sure, sometimes you have to adjust your course; sometimes you choose the wrong direction. But very often, in my experience, you need to trust your original plan, trust your original process to produce results, and "keep going."
3. Expect downturns. Believe it or not, your business will not always be strong. You will not experience unending growth and success. There is no such thing as endless summer; winter will always return! Yet so many owners and leaders seem completely blindsided when a downturn hits, when the sales chart no longer climbs, when their industry stops being the poster child of business success. Once you've been through a couple of downs and ups, through a few completely "unpredictable" crises, you start to realize that unpredictable crises are actually quite expected, quite normal. So, despite enjoying growth in the summer sunshine, make sure you can "sustain a certain degree of loss."
4. Business is Personal. There is a pervasive delusion that business is somehow separate from us, that it is something "out there" that deals only with facts and figures and production and sales. True, we have human resources departments, but we treat it as just another cog in the big mechanistic machine that is business. If we're honest with ourselves, we realize that this is hogwash - business is intensely personal. Business is first and foremost about relationships, about belonging to a group, about feeling competent and valued, about being able to express our creative drives, and about having fun or living through personal hell. If you're a business owner, you know intimately how personal business is - your whole identity is wrapped up in the daily progress of your company. So when our horoscope says "Practice endurance, and in the end you'll succeed," we see the connection between our company's success and our success. We need to be able to handle ups and downs in our business, and this means we each need to learn to handle ups and downs in our lives.
5. All horoscopes are crap. If you use astrology to make management decisions, you should stop.