EEKING reality? Forget meditation and just try asking an entrepreneur trying to stay alive and raise money, or a major corporation that relied on fancy accounting to move its stock price. Try asking a player in an emerging market or foreign country showing no sign of “emerging,” or an investor in any of these endeavors, especially those playing with their retirement money. In 2002, these folks and more have only too keen an appreciation of today’s business realities.
The times of razzle dazzle, expensive, “cutting edge” marketing and advertising campaigns aimed at customers, investors and/or big business, are over. We are getting back to the old-fashioned formula for success: the best services and products at a fair price every time, in a business that is reasonably profitable. And we have come to understand that this age-old successful business model needs to be delivered today, not that fictional date deep in the future when the world, and especially the services and products your customers really want, change sufficiently to appreciate (and buy!) the “new” business you came up with. That always struck many of us as counter-intuitive anyway, but hey, what did we know?
