People often make New Year's resolutions to improve their personal lives. But what about our professional lives? It's a good idea to look at your work life and the factors that impact it with the hopes of making plans to position yourself and your organization for continued growth and evolution, writes Juan Martinez, PhD, PE, FCSI in his latest blog post.
Many of us start the year with a series of personal resolutions. And, if you are like me, you may have already broken some of them, perhaps all of them.
What about our business and professional resolutions? I suggest that if you have not come up with your own professional or business-related resolutions it is time to start. I would consider it a strategic plan for the year or maybe it should be go on for the next few years.
Now that we survived the fiscal cliff and we know exactly what we need to do to combat the new healthcare legislation we can finally breathe a sigh of relief and take it easy the rest of this year. Right? No!
A recent survey shows that most Americans are extremely unhappy with the inaction that took place in Washington, D.C. at the end of 2012. Most of us realize that Congress' solution to the fiscal cliff crisis was little more than a band-aid and there's much healing that needs to happen for the country to move forward economically. We all hope that Congress gets down to the serious business of getting the country's fiscal house in order.
In the meantime, as business leaders, we cannot wait for Congress to find some common ground. We have to continue our fight to become more efficient in our respective businesses. We must find ways to drive more sales and reduce wasteful activities and cost. As I have stated before, true efficiency impacts both sides of the equation.
Although the U.S. temporarily avoided falling over its self-imposed fiscal cliff, our economy remains in a very delicate state and we must all acknowledge that what's happening in Washington, D.C. will have some sort of an impact on our lives, personally and professionally, both now and in the future. Perhaps our New Year's business resolution is to learn how to sift through all the legislative noise to see how we may be able to leverage those aspects of these actions to achieve a business gain on a customer by customer or project by project basis. Each organization has a unique market position and value proposition so we have to work collaboratively to find their silver lining amidst these economic clouds.
As for our company, since we will rely on our industrial engineering skills to help concepts become more efficient, we are excited about the industry's prospects in the coming months, regardless of the political environment. At least this is our attitude as we start the year, one that we will use to fuel part of our business plan and our New Year's resolution. What about you?
