Are Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt Making Your Choices?
I received an email from my mutual fund manager yesterday notifying me of a change or transaction on my account. It prompted me to take a peek at one of the mainstream media sites to check in on the stock markets in general.
The first title I saw was Stock market sees all time low amid Mideast unrest.
I’ll readily admit I’m not a big fan watching the day-to-day happenings of the markets, simply because I tend to find sensationalist headlines like this trying to constantly hyperextend your attention span — just one more time.
We are seeing riots and general unrest in the Mideast, and I had the pleasure of meeting several owners and executives from South African MPS providers who educated me the particular challenges they were facing. While business was great within the nation of South Africa itself, delivering service to neighboring states was virtually impossible because the fluctuation of exchange rates varied by over 300% and changed in upwards of six times per day!
And you thought you were having trouble finding a service provider to support an out of territory customer…
Fear, uncertainty and doubt create risk. Change can be a breeding ground for fear, because it fundamentally challenges our comfort and security. And as I said last week, you can’t manage change. You can only manage your reaction to the change — seizing it as opportunity or blaming it as obstacle.
It’s your choice.
We all face risk every day. It’s part of life. To attempt to draw a direct parallel to managed print services would certainly minimize the importance of such global events, but for those in this industry it is certainly a very real ingredient the recipe of our lives.
Do you accept it? Do you resist it? Do you ignore it?
In our 2010 MPS Channel Partner Selection Study, we understood that the two of the three greatest motivations for entering MPS involved a fear motivation, but the greatest one shared by all channels was that of opportunity. When I looked at that for the first time, it was a statistical reminder that people want to hope.
Pioneers in managed print services will quickly tell you they started their first engagements over a decade ago. As an IT Manager in 2003, I deployed one of the first comprehensive print and imaging programs in the SMB market that I knew of at the time. Did we call it managed print, and was it it really MPS?
Who cares, that’s not the point…
Instead, my point is that in all cases change created gaps, and in those gaps providers saw that they could be a bridge for their customer and ‘the solution’. I might ask you to look at your real reasons for thinking you need to be “in MPS” (if there is such a state of being).
If you are entering into MPS (or any new line of business) for fear alone, ask yourself one simple question: “If fear is my motivation today, will I be happy in what I’m doing 12 – 36 months from now?”
When I force myself that tough question every day, it changes my choices. If you aren’t in this habit, I suspect you might be turning from opportunity within your own business — and your own life.
Ken Stewart offers observations from the field of managed print services in his weekly column on MPS Insights every Wednesday. As a senior consultant with the Photizo Group, he comes from and works directly with channel providers in the managed services space, developing educational tools and resources to promote lasting business transformation.
Ken Stewart’s website, ChangeForge, focuses on the collision between the constantly changing worlds of business and technology in an information-centric world. Get the latest industry news, and follow ChangeForge on Twitter or become a fan on Facebook.
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