Personal Strategies for Huge Success in Downturns—Getting What You Want in Life from Business Times are Tough in Many industries—That’s Why It’s Your Golden Opportunity It’s time to move forward in your life and career because of the economic downturn. It’s strange. It may not seem like your golden moment, but in fact it’s the perfect time. You just need a downtime career strategy.

K. Jack Speer President The Delta Associates

Most of us have thoughts of wishing we’d sold the stock earlier, seen what was coming in the market place, hadn’t spent the money, had prepared better. But you didn’t fail. Sure you could have done some things differently, but then again there’s a whole host of new opportunities because there’s a downturn.

In good times, most managers can look good. In challenging times, only the best are stars. In epochs of war, there are more battlefield commissions given than any other time. As a reader of BizWatchOnline.com, you’re part of the top five percent of business achievers. That’s why times are good for you—despite or even because of the economy.

Create your own personal value statement and be able to say it in your sleep. Your value statement of what you bring to the workplace must be indisputable. You must be able to state that value and demonstrate it. A worthless statement of value would be, "I’m good in a manufacturing setting."

A statement of true value that would make you key to the organization would be, "I have the proven ability to slash inventory by 30% in the next 3 months and reduce costs by 25%." Be able to state beyond abstract technical skills what you are able do create for the company. I sit across the desk from people daily who cannot tell me why the organization should value them, and I tremble for their futures often more than they do.

In the World War II movie, Casa Blanca, with Humphrey Bogart, thousands of Europeans were desperately trapped in a city with no exit. The movie plot is centered around someone who possesses two irrevocable letters of transit that would get a person past the Nazi-controlled immigration guards. For those letters, most of the waiting immigrants were willing to do anything. You may not be able to command a value quite like the letters of transit, but your value statement should get you hired and promoted in downtimes.

If you can create a value like that—the ability to convey your organization through the impossible—you will be showered with rewards in spite of economic or any other kind of difficulty.

Be In Charge of Yourself—What You Want and What You’ll Give and Deliver! You’re amazingly resilient and nobody is going to be repo-ing your car or carrying off your furniture. Never show fear or give into irrational demands from superiors, especially when you are pushed into roles where you are marginalized or unable to succeed.

Remember Dagwood and Mister Dithers from the comics? I still see them in a huge number of newspapers, but I don’t read them and wonder who does? The work relationships are from the 1940s. Here’s Dagwood cringing in fear for his job and Mister Dithers jerking him around. He’s a subservient blathering idiot, too painful in my mind to be funny.

You have to know where and how you can deliver your value and to be in charge of yourself. We predicted in the ‘80s that the children of this century would be fearlessly independent and determine what they’ll do and what they’ll give. We are not suggesting that you be an arrogant slacker or that you can’t be led or trained. But by having carefully determined what value you are able to deliver to the company, you’ll know when you’re in the role where you can deliver that value. You’ll insist on fulfilling that role and deliver beyond even what you would have believed.

Be in Charge of Your Own Research and Development/Marketing Departments. You will have to continue to market your own skills and abilities and develop new ones. You show me a person who was VP or director of a company who is now flipping burgers and I’ll show you someone who let his skills expire like last year’s license tag.

Do you know someone who is fairly high up in an organization but seems like they just stepped out of the 70s? I know someone who was director of operations of a fairly large organization. This friend early declared to me his boredom at reading and learning and kept doing the same ol’ same ol’, faster and harder.

When he lost his last job, he sent out a plaintive email to those whom he had known, saying he was sorry he hadn’t kept up his network, but that he had been so busy. (Busier, I guess, than the rest of us who should now drop everything and come to his aid.) I heard the other day he landed his third job since I worked with him professionally, and was proud he’d done it in a month. These folks end up as assistant managers of Wendy’s, decrying how bad "old age discrimination" is.

Do these three things and you’ll grow and prosper during downtimes—often better than in prosperity.