Tales Of A Fourth Generation Textile Executive: Look At All The Angles

One great thing that I learned from attending law school was that you always need to look at situations from all angles.  As much as I hated law school, I learned a ton of skills and how to think differently than most others who haven’t attended law school.

With that, starting in 2020, I urge you to always look at things from all angles when making big decisions in business or life.   Don’t be closed minded and think that your way is the only way and always the right one.  That is a foolish path to follow and one that is going to limit your growth.

When a situation arises, I suggest you take a neutral position and look at all the positives, the negatives and everything in between.  You could even take a piece of paper out and write the positive and negatives in two different columns.  Take each position and write them on the paper.  Then, maybe even ask some other people what they think as you may be missing something that is obvious or important.  After you have done that, you need to evaluate the two columns and see which provides you with the most compelling argument to make a proper decision under the circumstances.

On top of the positives and negatives, you might also want to anticipate how your decision is going to play out and affect different classes of people i.e. customers, employees, family, etc.  Anticipation is an important skill.  It’s like seeing the future in your mind in order to help you make the best decisions possible.  Things don’t always play out as you anticipated, but at least you made an effort to anticipate the best and worst results and made an educated decision after much thoughtful consideration.

A while back, I wrote a post about Fortunoff-ism.  These are sayings that my family and I live by in business and you can often hear them being said around the office.  One of them is, “I don’t do what ifs.”  In my discussion above, when evaluating the positives and negatives, this is one time when you can ponder some “what ifs.”  Again, this goes hand and hand with anticipation.  When you perform this task, you should make sure to even consider some very extreme or unlikely scenarios as those sometimes come to fruition too regardless of odds.

Long story short, in 2020,  be careful and thoughtful. Don’t be blind to the negatives or the positives for that matter.  And most of all, don’t be a stubborn know it all because no one will be able to stand you.

Got You Thinking Scott

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