What is it to be resilient?

The other day I got asked a question: “How resilient are you?”. The question was asked to me in a friendly environment, but it made me really start thinking. Why should anyone be asked to be resilient in the modern business environment? How can it even be an option to be resilient? Why should it be a trait to be resilient? Nothing in life should be about being resilient and nothing, I repeat nothing, in business should be so. Business, just as life, should be about adapting to the changing environment to produce the best possible output. Regardless if that output is happiness or steaming cash!

Business shall be about making money. Nothing more, nothing less. You can decide if you want to make that money in a decent manner or if you want to make that money in a dirty manner. That is completely up to you as an entrepreneur. The bottom line however is that you try to create the best product there is, with the buying consumer in mind. You aim to get the highest possible revenue out of some sort of input. That’s business.

If your customers buy expensive cause it blings, then you should make things that bling. If your customers buy stuff cause they think you have the most fair way of producing a good, then you should make it such. All in all, you should focus on what your customer really want and then try to make the highest possible turnover from that desire.

So far, everyone agrees with me. I hope. But why is it then seen as a trait that you are resilient as an employee? Customers aren’t! “Oh, we’re sorry you weren’t satisfied with our product this time either. Stick around a while longer and we’ll make sure to perhaps meet some of your expectations in the future. Remember, not all of them, but some of them.”

One time, yes perhaps, but to say that this is something that the customer should get used to?? No way. You would never say that, and you would never want that to be the case. Cause you would know that your customer would vote with his or her feet and go to a competitor that would be able to offer her or him that good.

So why is it that we. The young people striving for change, should have to wait around for better times?  We shouldn’t! To quote Obama; “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” That’s change for you. If we don’t move in the pace of our customers, then the customers will always look away from us for a better alternative.

When it comes to the web, this is even more so the case. The total transparency between promise and fulfillment becomes extremely powerful in an environment where everyone has the production capabilities to make oneself heard, and anyone can tell a story interesting enough for loads of people to listen.

We do not know what the world will look like tomorrow and we cannot look into the future. What we do know is that it will be different than today. If we apply what we did yesterday, to the imagination of today, we still don’t reach there. We do not know. The only way to change tomorrow is to learn from yesterday, use all that is in our power today and take lead to realize our dreams for tomorrow. We need to dream, and it’s the dreams that should guide us rather than what is plausible right now. If you can think it, then you can do it. Especially when looking at it from a technology perspective.

If you lead, you will be a lot more uncomfortable than if you follow, but you will always be inline with what is now. Leading, is also taking a risk. What if people do not follow? Well that is really no risk at all, cause if you do really dream, and you utilize what is out there for you to utilize right now, and if you’ll listen to your customers whilst leading, then you will be able to change direction before it is too late. If you choose to follow, then you will always be one step away from being obsolete. Someone else will lead your customers away from you.

Now people often ask me about what ROI you can expect from using Social Media. I have been fortunate enough to learn a lot of ways to calculate this, and I don’t blame them for asking. However, the big question is what kind of return you as a company want. Either you want the same returns as you’ve always had, and thus you do the same thing, but in an online format. Or, you realize that you do have a great chance to take the lead and increase the rate at which your return builds in your pockets.

It is really up to us to decide where we want to take the present and how we want to lead into the future.