Some years ago, Art Garfunkel sang a Bruce Johnston song with these lyrics:
"Reality, it's not for me and it makes me laugh ..."
Sometimes, reality just isn't that much fun. But confronting reality is the ante for just surviving in business. In fact, Larry Bossidy and Ram Charan wrote an entire book about Confronting Reality. In that book they said:
"To confront reality is to recognize the world as it is, not as you wish it to be, and have the courage to do what must be done,not what you'd like to do."
Doesn't sound that hard. But it is. To illustrate, get your key people together and ask them this question: What used to be true in our business, but no longer is?
NOTE: I wrote this post over a year ago. It seems even more relevant now than it did then.
