In this world of proclaiming “I’m offended by that!” and blaming everyone else but ourselves when something goes wrong, we are rapidly losing the essence of our freedoms because we want more and more laws and regulations that restrict the choices and decisions of others so we, ourselves, won’t have to adapt, change, or learn more. We have become a lazy society.
Despite that, the real world of business has an immutable law that cares little about you being offended or wanting to blame failures on others.
Too often we hear that failed companies and companies moving to countries offering lower-wage workers is the fault of management or the executive team. Yet, those leaders are expected to execute their responsibility: to achieve maximum profits. Would you have them do a poor job at their responsibilities just to placate you, just so you don’t have to step up to your responsibilities?
You can help or you can hinder corporate success and thereby have a major impact on the choices of the executive team. In other words, just as much as the buck stops with the management and executive team, the buck just as much stops with YOU.
Your responsibility is to continually improve. When you don’t, competition will outpace and overrun your company with cheaper alternatives or cheaper ways to make or offer products and services. Rather than face extinction, the leadership team has to maneuver to locations of maximum advantage for corporate profitability.
To survive this world of brutal competition from other countries you must improve yourself and improve everything you are hired to do. You work as part of the team to help the company do and make more, and to do that in ways which are more efficient, less costly, and more productive. Thereby, boosting profits.
How can you make such demanding contributions? By CONTINUOUSLY LEARNING.
You must continuously improve your qualifications and understanding of what it takes for your company to succeed. You must continuously upgrade your area of expertise. And you must do so both academically and experientially. You must acquire new and useful knowledge for both your sake and that of the company’s. You must invent, innovate, envision, and then help make, or encourage, positive changes, within your team or division, which help the company succeed.
By continually upgrading your knowledge and skills, you can bring in new ideas and even align better for the corporate good. With increased knowledge and experience you can identify potential problems at their lowest-cost occurrences and can imagine new visions or opportunities to pursue for yourself, your team, and your division. You may be able to invent new products, techniques. You may be able to reconstruct teams and other structures within the company, or even alter the internal dynamics of such. Even to be in a better position, and better qualified, to identify, seek out, participate in, and explore the emerging new worlds of new or unique eco-systems.
You, yourself, must undertake a continuous initiative of upgrading your knowledge, and of contributing, in ways useful to your company’s future success.
In the bricks and mortar world of retail stores the adage may be “Location.Location.Location.” In the world of the corporate knowledge-worker, the adage, rather the admonition, is, “Learn. Learn. Learn.”
END NOTE
TWO Useful Nuggets to read: