In a comment on my September 11 post Kate Lavender said, “I have always believed that quote “we are not made, or unmade, by the things that happen to us but by our reactions to them” – I had lost sight of that of late and your story brings the importance of personal choices being who we are back full force.”

I’m grateful to Kate; it’s good to know my point was made with at least one person.

This is as true for companies as it is for individuals and especially true in the current economic environment.

We can use this economic debacle to change the way we live, do business and innovate; we can stop up-sizing and down-sizing and learn to right-size; we can learn that keeping all our balls in the air isn’t the same as having all the balls existent.

We can start by recognizing that the current mess is substantially of our own making. It started years ago as we turned our personal responsibility over to our leaders, whether political, religious or business. (See Jim Stroup’s excellent post on this subject.)

Along with this abdication of responsibility we chose decades ago to forget/ignore another bit of ancient wisdom, “if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.”

How else to explain the number of Ponzi schemes unraveling, the most recent is 30 years old, not because the good guys caught the bad guys, but as fallout from the recession.

Returning to Kate’s quote, will our reactions to what is going on make or unmake us?

What do you think?

Your comments—priceless

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Image credit: ZedBee|Zoë Power on flickr

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 15th, 2009 at 1:30 am and is filed under About Leadership, Personal Development, What Do You Think?. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: accountability, consequences, Ponzi, responsibility
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