Jim Blasingame

Business futurist, award-winning author, speaker and columnist

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In defense of the misunderstood scrooge

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This is Jim’s traditional Christmas column.

Some say I’m a scrooge. They might be right.

Here are three exhibits (some say excuses) in my defense of this indictment:

1. The early part of my career was spent in retail. Retailers know what that job does to your holiday spirit. There’s a syndrome for everything else; why not one for retail survivors? Let’s call it RPTHSS: Retail Post-Traumatic Holiday Shock Syndrome.

2. Since I don’t wait until the holidays to give someone a gift, I just don’t get all worked up about holiday giving. Not that the ladies mind getting stuff all year (let’s not lose our heads!). It’s just that they want me to be giddy about giving at Christmas-time. Giddy? Bah! Humbug!

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Jim Blasingame reconciles his 2019 Predictions

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Allow me to reconcile my 2019 Predictions from a year ago – my 20th edition – with what happened. Up to now, I’m batting .733.

Small Business

Prediction: Small business confidence will again record levels above NFIB’s 45-year average.
Actual: NFIB Index of Small Business Optimism finishes well above the multi-decade average of 98 points: +1

Prediction: Millions of Baby Boomer business owners will be challenged in divesting to the next generation.
Actual: Research shows (Kaufman) and books have been written (“Boomer Bust”) about the unprecedented challenge of older owners selling to the next generations: +1

Prediction: Stronger financial conditions will help small businesses deal with economic headwinds.
Actual: The best indicator is how well the small business sector has weathered the global trade issues while supporting those strategies: +1

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Four business lessons I learned on the farm

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Growing up on a farm provided many valuable lessons that have transferred beautifully to my life in the non-farming marketplace. Here are four of those timeless and universal lessons.
 
The Application of Patience
In civil society, patience is respected as one of the great virtues. Who hasn’t heard the admiration, “The patience of Job?” But in the marketplace, patience is half of a powerful paradox because of its alter ego – impatience.

Impatience can be a problem – everybody knows that. But not when it morphs into urgency, because in the marketplace, urgency is not only good, it’s essential. Knowing how to transmogrify impatience into urgency is a lesson we can take from the farmer.

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Spring cleaning for small business – in December

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“What’s the best use of my time right now?” is the abiding management question out here on Main Street. But at no other time of the year are we more time-management challenged than in December.

The reason is because the twelfth month is the only one where two powerful imperatives converge against a hard stop, each demanding a full measure of your time and resources: 1) The perennial push to close out the sales year as strongly as possible; while 2) simultaneously taking steps to set the business up for a fast and clean start when the New Year dawns on January 1.

Pardon the sports metaphor, but in the marketplace game your business plays all year, December is the two-minute drill of your fourth quarter. And in this tight transition period, that fierce competition for precious time and resources requires discipline and devotion to fundamentals.

Our grandmothers practiced the fundamental of spring cleaning when the weather broke warm. In the marketplace, in order to kick off the New Year right, your spring cleaning should happen before then. There are many targets of a business’s December cleaning, but here are five important ones to get you started.

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When cause-and-effect met humanity

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This is Jim’s traditional Thanksgiving column.

As the 17th century dawned, cause-and-effect was merging two parallel universes.

In the Old World, a group of Leiden Separatists was making decisions that would put them on a circuitous journey. Meanwhile, in the New World, a manchild named Tisquantum was born to the Patuxet tribe of the Wampanoag Indians.

Both the Separatists and Tisquantum became very important to the future of mankind, but not before their lives would change and intertwine in ways not to be imagined by the inhabitants of either world.

In search of religious freedom, the Separatists crisscrossed Europe and then the Atlantic Ocean. On their odyssey, these unlikely explorers would steel their convictions, which would prove handy in the New World.

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Relevance – the Customer’s new prime expectation

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When describing what influences the behavior of individuals as they pursue their lives, you would likely include concepts associated with goals, plans, passion, desire, ego, personality, etc. In matters of human interaction as we meet, love, and work together, there is often an abiding struggle between my passion and your ego, for example, or your goals and my plans. Indeed, successful long-term personal relationships are heavily weighted on my tolerance of you today and your forbearance of me tomorrow. Give and take. And the world goes round.

But in the marketplace, affection and sentiment give way to contracts and performance, because tolerance and forbearance are always subjective, often inefficient, and sometimes unproductive. Consequently, a very powerful concept developed over the millennia that is the nucleus of how marketplace participants minimize conflict and find common ground. In classically efficient marketplace style, I’ve reduced this concept to one word: expectations.

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