Accentuate the Positive
I am always looking for articles to post on our web site that are both informative and helpful to our clients. What I have found is that while there are plenty of articles, most of them are overwhelmingly negative with titles like, “Consumer confidence declines” or “Jobless claims increase.” I have decided that I am not going to post any more of these. I want to put up positive news. I want to talk about what is going well, not what is going badly.
Surely there are industries in Arizona that are having a tough time. Real estate and construction are two of the most visible. But, we also have plenty of companies where things are going well. Really well. In fact, according to The Arizona Republic, the 32 PUBLICLY TRADED companies in Arizona with more than $100 million dollars per year in revenue have cash on hand of over $16.1 billion dollars; an average of over $500 million in cash being held by each company. And those are just the public companies with over $100 million in annual revenues.
The Phoenix Business Journal reports that small businesses are also reporting significant improvement. Thirty-five percent say that they plan to ADD employees, 44 percent believe business conditions are IMPROVING (only 9 percent think conditions are worse), nearly 50 percent report that their financial position has IMPROVED and 27 percent plan to INCREASE spending.
These are all solid signals that in spite of all the news stories to the contrary, things really are getting better. But, we need to keep in mind the well known saying that good news does not sell papers. So because there is no incentive for the media to report positive news, we end up hearing only the negative, “the sky is falling” stories. Maybe we need to look at the real world—our own individual environments. We should pay attention to our own companies. How are WE doing? My guess is that more of us than not will discover that things are pretty good when viewed objectively.
Certainly there is no shortage of people among our co-workers having a tough go of it in their personal lives, and it is only natural for that to manifest in their attitudes in the workplace. But it is incumbent upon all of us to make sure that negative attitude does not become the culture of our working environment. We should become emissaries of good news to help our co-workers keep perspective. If we continue to focus on the negatives, if we continue to let our own and our employee’s personal challenges color our outlook, it will create the proverbial self-fulfilling prophecy and nothing will improve. Perhaps its time to live by the lyrics of Johnny Mercer’s 1940s hit, Accentuate the Positive . . .
“You’ve got to accentuate the positive
Eliminate the negative
And latch on to the affirmative
Don’t mess with Mister In-Between
You’ve got to spread joy up to the maximum
Bring gloom down to the minimum
Have faith or pandemonium’s
Liable to walk upon the scene”
I vote for focusing on the positive. Who is with me?
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