Emotions in Business Today

by Jason Ogden | Jul 26, 2022

I want to talk about emotions in business in this particular moment – today. And I want to give you a little bit of context for where I’m coming from and share something that I’m personally experiencing. Maybe someone out there is seeing or feeling the same kind of way.

So, as we’re in this moment where there are some negative financial headwinds going on in the world, you know, when we have moments like this, they happen, it’s part of the cycle. The causes and the flavors are always a little bit different. Usually, as business leaders, we’re most concerned with how severe they are going to be and how long are they going to last. But in the context of this one, I think it’s a little bit different, and it’s bringing up a different kind of feeling about it than is typical.

So, contextually, thinking about the last 2 years, we spent a lot of our time focused on adaptation as business leaders. And we’ve spent an awful lot of our energy functioning in much shorter time frames than is typical, right? Usually, we’re in 90-day, 6-month,12-month horizons of thinking, and over the last 2 years, there was a lot of 30-day horizons to work off of. And coming into this year, at least for me and within our business, had this sense that those short terms were behind us. We were moving into a longer-term way of viewing and seeing and thinking about things. And really getting back into building business, right?

This is the thing that we’re all really talented and really energized by, and frankly, it’s why we get up in the morning. And, beginning of this year, that’s kind of how it started. Everything was on track. People were ready to start making long-term decisions around things like culture and new product development, and all the things that we get amped about doing this business thing.

And a couple of months in, April, May, you know, we’re all facing a different mixture of things, you know?

• Everybody’s facing pricing inflation.
• Everybody’s facing labor market issues.
• Depending on what industry you’re in, you may be facing some supply chain disruption.
• Or, maybe your capital and financial structure are getting wrecked by the fed tightening, right?

So, we’re all facing some version of this stuff. And the emotions are triggered – this is after two years of playing defense and preserving and protecting. The mindset coming into this year, at least mine was, that “it’s time to get back to building again,” and to do what we want to do. And the last thing that anybody wanted to be talking about or thinking about at this point is playing defense.

Personally, the way that I’ve got to a good place with it is just acknowledging what the moment requires of us. Focus on the things that are still within our control. And, even if you may not be doing what you set out to do at the beginning of this year, you can still be building when you’re focused on other aspects of your business besides just top-line growth.