Recently, while watching the evening news with my wife, we started talking about optimism and pessimism and the way the world is going in these times of uncertainty, terrorism and fear (real or imagined – does it make a difference?)

My initial reaction was to shrug off the subject as not very important on the basis that the world has long been torn by strife and suffering and that the news, being what it is, focuses primarily on the bad stuff and less on the positive. But the subject of optimism vs. pessimism kept coming back to me and so I decided to dig a bit into them and find out more. After all, uncertain times bring change and our optimism or pessimism drive how we react to change.

Clearly, optimism and change have a direct bearing on your business no matter what the product or service, the client or customer, or the suppliers. Whether you formally use a quality system that by its very nature incorporates continuous improvement to adapt to change, or operate reactively and get by with doing what comes naturally, change is inevitable. As has been said in previous postings here, the ideal response to change is to have some form of continuous improvement process in place which provides more or less of an “automatic” mechanism to deal with change. Without meaningful ways to successfully incorporate change into a business, the business is doomed to fail.