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It is easy to get disillusioned, feel defeated or beat yourself up when things don’t go as planned when, in the face of obstacles, you need to do the exact opposite. You need to admit to your frustrations and negative emotions, be kind to yourself, re-group, and if necessary, change your strategy. You need to get practical, emotional, mental and/or spiritual support to keep you going and moving forward.

Change is inevitable for individuals, businesses, communities and nations. Your only choice is how you work with it – it’s as simple as that.

In an economic squeeze, businesses naturally focus on driving revenue and reducing costs. But there’s plenty of evidence to demonstrate a strong link between high performance and a positive working environment.

Organisations are often tied to a teamwork ideology. It’s just ‘the way things are done’ and how we are socially trained to think – isn’t it? There are trends in society that may change the way we think, the most important being the Internet and its applications. ‘Two heads are better than one’ assumes that heads (people) hold information. Of course they do, but in today’s wired world, a big part of the information we use in our daily work has relocated from heads to networks. You can find information either online by using search engines, or via networks that people are more or less loosely connected to (such as Facebook, Wikipedia or LinkedIn).

What, you might think, does ‘Zero Tolerance’ – policing that allows no crime or anti-social behaviour to be overlooked – have to do with my business? There are a number of ways in which the principle can be helpful when you’re managing change. As your company develops, you will face a moment when you choose between what you’ve done before and what you might achieve in the future. The easy route is to ‘stay the same’ – but in fact no business ever stays the same, and if you don’t make positive changes at the right moment, the prognosis for your business won’t be good.

One of the difficulties many successful entrepreneurs have when their business grows into a bigger organisation is changing their own mindset from doing everything in the business to delegating work to their staff. We have some guidelines that can help you, or an employee, when struggling to make the transition.

In an economic squeeze, businesses naturally focus on driving revenue and reducing costs. But there’s plenty of evidence to demonstrate a strong link between high performance and a positive working environment. According to a major study published in 2001, not only is there a link between employee attitudes and profitability – improvements in employee satisfaction ‘cause a demonstrable, measurable improvement in financial performance’.

There’s a second stage when your business moves out of the ‘consolidation’ phase. This is when the focus of the leadership group needs to move away completely from day to day operations: they need to become Directors, with their focus on strategic, financial and legal issues – and the second tier of management needs to take over the day-to-day running of the organisation.

It’s easy to let your business grow and develop without having to think too much about the direction it’s taking. But at some point it’s going to become an entity in itself – a ‘proper’ organisation, with a life of its own – and you need to start thinking about giving it some positive direction.

Businesses grow up with a certain ‘culture’ – it seems simply to develop, often without intention. In our social lives we recognise unwritten rules – like inappropriate language, for example. In our business lives there are also unwritten rules, which seem to ‘morph’ into the company’s culture, and assume a life of their own. Culture often just evolves.