If you’re squeamish you might now want to read this. The January 4, 2011 headline in the Wall Street Journal is, “Stock Surge Rings In Year.” A headline in the Seattle Times business section is, “Economy’s manufacturing a comeback.” At the same time, unemployment is still high and a lot of businesses are struggling. Many owners I talk to are doing things they’ve never done before to survive (or thrive). In other words, they are being resourceful.
Here’s the squeamish part. The other day one of our cats brought a rodent into our house (cats courtesy of my youngest daughter, the animal magnet). Talk about resourceful. Once loose the little guy easily evaded us, crawled under the refrigerator and disappeared.
Sherlock Holmes stated that when you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth. The improbable was that after searching the house we realized that somehow our visitor had gone under the refrigerator, squeezed through a very thin opening and crawled under the U-shaped kitchen cabinets, all the way around to under the cooktop. At this point we got resourceful. We blocked off the underside of the refrigerator, emptied the appropriate cabinets, placed traps and went to bed. By morning our guest was no more, lured by the peanut butter bait. Interestingly, the second trap had some peanut butter missing but was not sprung.
In business, in these interesting times, we need to be resourceful. There’s a lot good stuff happening in the economy. It’s just not as blatantly obvious as it was a few years ago. We have to be as resourceful as the little visitor we had. We need to be prepared, look for any openings we can find and take advantage of them. Here’s to a great and prosperous year.