Our new normal

Ahh the good ole days!  They were great.  Just about everyone drove shiny new car, had a job that paid very well with benefits, stocks and other investments normally grew at a reasonable pace and life was easy and predictable. 

The good ole days aren’t coming back folks.  Now is the time of Our New Normal.  Brace yourself.  

Will work for silver.

For those that will wallow and be victims of the new normal, this blog is not for you.  You can’t go back in time, you probably can’t even re-create it because the conditions surrounding the good ole days are gone. 

So what’s the new normal?  The USA isn’t the THE superpower in the world anymore.  The dollar in your pocket is on par with our Canadian neighbors to the north and unemployment is going to stay about 9% for the foreseeable future just has it has for the recent past.  Also your house isn’t worth squat.  This is the new normal. 

What else is new?  College degrees are over priced and carry less and less value.  For the college graduate, what awaits them isn’t much different from what they left five years earlier, their bedroom at Mom and Pops.  But now they are burdened by a heavy debt load that they were ill prepared to handle and currently unable to afford.  You can’t sell your degree either.  That paper your degree is printed on isn’t worth the $40 to $75 grand that you financed.  Bummer.  The new normal.

For those that don’t go to college high paying manufacturing jobs are not around like they were 20 years ago.  Getting an entry-level job at the big three in Detroit pays about $14 an hour these days.  I hope you know something about computers or the internet.

So what do you do with this information?  The new normal doesn’t sound so good does it?  Ahh but all these facts I’ve laid out are just random bits of information.  People are living their dream outside of the doom and gloom news reports because when it boils right down to it we are not statistics.  We are hopes and dreams wrapped up in these terrestrial bodies and yet our energy to create is limitless and cannot be contained.  Now is the time to embrace the dreams you hold in your heart.  It’ll never be cheaper to create, hire and build your dreams as it is today.

Behold the power of the new normal.  The new normal is the internet, smart phones, twitter, interconnectedness, opportunity, low costs, low risk and the ability to build your own dreams all with just a spark of inspiration from your brain.

Security, stability and safety don’t exist.

“Security, stability and safety don’t exist.  You think they do but they do not.  It’s something made up in your mind or it was a story, a fairytale, someone told you.  Probably someone you trust implicitly.  And you chose to believe them because it felt good.”  (here’s the full post)

 

I wrote this a couple of months ago.  It was part of my first blog.  I’ve written a blog every weekday since that first one.  I wanted to bring up this section of that blog post because I believe this theme should be discussed a little bit more.

What if these guys walk away?

 

Who are you competing against? Part 2 of 2

Yesterday I talked about my time as an ROTC Range Challenge coach and the parallels between knowing yourself and your company before you can focus on competition. You can read about it here.  Today I’ll finish my story about the relationship between you and your competitors.

Knowing who is the best helps focus your team.  In this case, Ohio State University Army ROTC was the reigning champion.  They had unbelievable Cadets at that University.  Their Cadet Corps was well over 200 strong.  They would field two nine-person teams year after year.  The “A” team would win the competition and the “B” team would finish in the top ten or better.  They cross trained with the football team and had vast resources and a proven winning culture.  They were unbeatable!  I have a lot of respect for those Cadets and their leadership who trained them. 

Our goal was to beat them. 

It can take years to accomplish your goal

 

3 reasons why Borders is broke

Borders filed for bankruptcy yesterday.  They will close 200 of their 642 stores over the next few weeks.  That is roughly a one third reduction of their brick and mortar stores.  Ouch.  I’ve heard that the last card to fall is payment to creditors when a company is ailing.  It would seem that for the last month or so Borders had delayed payments to their creditors.  The writing was on the wall.  It was the death rattle if you will.  They may be able to recover but they are pretty sick and in need of reorganization. 

Those are some old books. Where are the new ones?

 

How to offend your customers

Someone thought the Groupon Tibet Super Bowl commercial was a good idea.  Actually a lot of people did.  The ad agency did, Groupon did and anyone else involved in the process and approval of that television ad thought they were going to hit a homerun.

I should do commercials

 

5 part series starts next week

Next week I’ll post a five-part series about the relationship between the leader and the team members.  

Extra, Extra!

So mark your calendars.  Blog #1, “You will lead them” is in the queue for Monday morning at 6:30am sharp. 

I’ll send out reminders on Twitter and facebook too.

Thanks for reading,

-Matt

Willy Wonka’s $300 million dollar golden ticket

What would you do with $300 million dollars?  I cannot believe how big the Mega Millions jackpot has ballooned to.  That’s a lot of clams.

It’s hard to even fathom that amount.

Now what?!

Lottery winners famously go broke because they didn’t earn the windfall.  If they have bad financial habits, they will still have them.  Those poor habits will be multiplied by about three hundred million percent.