The headline on the front cover of the December 5, issue of Time Magazine reads, “Why Anxiety Is Good for You”. The article talks about how anxiety can be a positive force as long as you don’t react to it in an unhealthy way. I agree wholeheartedly when it comes to running a business. Certainly, juvenile industry companies have no shortage of things to be anxious about—whether it’s the typical things like competitive pressures and personnel issues or the daunting industry-specific regulatory challenges. I don’t have to tell you that building a successful JP business is very hard work. As a CEO, there are probably days when you wonder where you can find the strength to cope with it all.

The point is that you absolutely can and should use frustration, dissatisfaction, and fear to your advantage! I have this theory that most successful businesspeople (and athletes) are perfectionists to at least some degree. And, it is that constant emotional tension between the imperfect status quo and a more perfect vision of what things could be like that is the fuel that keeps them going. Show me a very successful person and I’ll show you someone who is “relentless” in the positive sense of the word. They are driven to close the gap between current reality and their vision of a more perfect world. In business, this “gap-closing” is the essence of “business development”—not to be confused with “business direction” which is the day-to-day management of the business as it exists today. You need to do both.

“Business development” is the creation and then continuous improvement of your business model. It doesn’t get done well by people who are content with the way things are. It gets done by people who have that “fire in the belly” caused by dissatisfaction. Of course, the trick is to not let the fire eat away your belly lining. Instead, you can convert anxiety into aspiration through a simple 5 step process:

1.       Create a culture of continuous improvement. When you or your staff members are anxious or aggravated about the way things are going, nothing is more demotivating than thinking this is the way it’s always going to be. Every good sports team I know of talks about getting better week after week. You can live through almost anything if you know that work is being done to fix what’s broken. As CEO, it’s your job to establish a corporate mindset that it’s everyone’s responsibility to keep making the organization better and better.
 

2.      Understand your current internal and external reality.In an earlier post, The CEO as “Chief Reality Officer” (link), I talked about some of the things you can do on an ongoing basis to stay in touch with current reality company-wide. Make sure you have an accurate picture of everything you and your staff can feel good about and whatever it is you need to be anxious about. A SWOT analysis is often the format used—internal Strengths andWeaknesses, external Opportunities and Threats.

3.      Create a shared medium-term (e.g. 3 year) vision. I encourage my clients to craft in writing a shared long-term vision(what you ideally want your company to ultimately be in the distant future) that probably never changes, but also a sharedmedium-term vision (e.g. where you want to be 3 years from now on the road to the long-term vision) that is revised annually as part of the business development process. It’s the medium-term vision that becomes the driving and guiding force. Just having it in place does wonders for company morale in tough times. Make sure it’s exciting and motivating while not being unrealistic. Not to go biblical on you, but remember Moses and his promise of “a land flowing with milk and honey”? That probably started out as a 3 year vision but ended up working reasonably well for 40 miserable years in the desert.

4.      Determine what business model changes/improvements (“strategies”) will close the gap. When you have an exciting picture of what things could be like in a few years, it’s surprising how easy and fun it is for you and your key staff members to come up with possible changes to your processes, product line, distribution channels, target consumers, etc. that will get you there. This is a creative process that lends itself to brainstorming followed by whittling the list down to the best options. 

5.       Implement the strategies. This is the toughest part. It’s like the difference between designing a new product and actually getting it to market successfully. Too many companies are very good at steps 1-4 and then fall flat on implementation because they don’t have a good process in place to create action plans, monitor progress, deal with the inevitable “real world” setbacks, and hold people accountable for results. Keep everyone’s eyes on the vision and make strategy implementation a company priority.

Remember, when you find yourself reaching for the Tums, you have a choice. You can take a woe is me attitude and beat yourself up or you can use your angst as fuel for your continuous improvement engine. And, don’t give in to the temptation to fix each problem that comes along in isolation or simply put out fires without fixing root causes. I can assure you you’ll be far better off taking a holistic approach like the one outlined above.