In these roller coaster economic times I see many people
gather their inner strength and "put their shoulder to the
wheel," working hard to create prosperous businesses. Some are
expending lots of energy planning and some are organizing.
Let's take a moment to talk about the important difference
between the two. This distinction has an effect on your
future.
According to my little pocket dictionary,
/planning/ is a method of accomplishing an objective.
That means, we have a goal and we have a list, a diagram or a
picture of how to achieve that goal. /Organizing/ is
defined as setting up an administrative structure. So planning
is used to get us from an uncomfortable situation to a better
one, organizing takes place when we take action to make the
current situation more comfortable. One is the vehicle that
can take you to a destination, and the other is about how neat
and useful the glove compartment is whether the car is moving
or not. Each has their place but in hard times ten minutes of
planning is worth two hours of organizing.
Let's take an example: Perhaps it is the goal of your
retail business to attract more customers to your door. The
plan might be to but out colorful flags to attract passing
traffic (in Feng Shui moving objects and color attract chi).
You may want to update your listings for local internet search
maps such as Yahoo Maps.
You might want to ask some of your faithful customers to
review your business on sites like Yelp.com. You can call your
local newspaper and give them some timely news related to your
business and see if they will do a story on you. You might
decide to do a flyer advertising an open house or event and
walk it into local businesses. You might write a press release
about what you have to offer and fax it to local radio and
television stations. You might want to send out a newsletter
to your existing customers asking them to refer your business
to friends.
All of these things listed together (with perhaps a
timeline of when you want to do them) constitute a plan.
However, some who want more customers try to get them by
organizing instead. They clean (which does stimulate the chi
but only briefly, and has more effect on the people who visit
the store than on customers who have never visited before).
They purge (creating empty space will also attract energy, but
again it has more effect on those who are already in the
space). They discount prices. They increase hours the shop is
open. They update software or computers. And the problem is
that with all that work (and it does feels like work--you
clean all day, the body hurts), no new customers are actually
attracted to the store.
In the past when business was good and you were busy, just
every once in a while you got a small breather, a few days
when there were not so many customers. You could take that
short time to clean and organize what you could and as fast as
you could, because you knew the next rush was coming. But in
these uncertain times it is better to make a plan--a map to a
destination--rather than focusing on organizing yourself into
a clean but empty
store.
