It is much easier to lose your nerve than it is to regain it, so better not to lose it in the first place. I have lost my nerve before and made decisions I regretted for a long time after they were made. Acting out of fear leads to poor decision making and a lack of leverage that, in turn, leads to unfavorable outcomes. That is why you must maintain your nerve and focus on the actions you need to take to create positive change, rather than allowing yourself to be overtaken by fear. Fear is one of those emotions that grows to fill the space.
When this downturn began, I had a client that wanted to extend our contract at half the previous rate in order to cut costs. Without any other projects in hand it would have been very easy to take their offer and hope that something better would come along. It’s much harder to walk away from guaranteed income and focus on winning new clients during the biggest downturn in a generation, but I did. The outcome?
Not losing my nerve, refusing this offer, and fully dedicating myself to revitalizing my business led to:
- Signing my first two clients outside the United States
- Signing a top literary agent to represent my book project and John Wiley & Sons to publish it (the five-star Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire)
- Building upon my book Stoking Your Innovation Bonfire by creating the Nine Innovation Roles Diagnostic Tool to help companies improve their innovation team success
- Becoming a popular innovation keynote speaker and thought leader
- My personal innovation blog expanding to become the leading innovation blog on the web – Blogging Innovation – with more than 15 contributing authors and upwards of 200,000 monthly page views
- Blogging Innovation becoming the foundation for Innovation Excellence, the world’s most popular innovation web site – a Top 1% site that now regularly generates 800,000+ monthly page views (before it was sold in early 2020)
- Launching a new business focused on helping b2b companies increase their inbound sales leads and revenue through execution of customer journey research and creation of an effective b2b pull marketing strategy that includes the use of my proprietary single content input, multiple content output methodology
So before you lose your nerve and start asking yourself all those questions about what could go wrong, focus instead on asking yourself about the actions you could take now to make sure that things go right.
Are you going to be nervous in the downturn, or nervy? If you act fearful, your clients will be afraid to do business with you, but if you’re confident that you will do great things, then your clients will want to do great things with you.
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I had the opportunity to meet and chat with local ethnographic researcher Cynthia DuVal about the role of ethnographic research in the innovation process, and she shared an insight that I thought I would share with the rest of you.
Because the team will likely only get the insights mostly right, it is important that your go-to-market processes include a great deal of modularity and flexibility. In the same way that product development processes have to design for certain components that are ‘likely’ to be available, but also have a backup design available that substitutes already released components–should the cutting edge components not be ready in time.
My presidential campaign picked up a lot of steam in 2008, but of course I came up short.
The operational model for charities in this country is an ideal candidate for disruptive innovation. It strikes me as odd that charities, the organizations that really have the least to spend on marketing, spend such inordinate amounts of money and time on marketing to raise money. Does spending lots of money on fundraising actually work?
The twittersphere erupted with news of GM’s announcement that it was refusing to pay for 2013 Super Bowl advertisements and $10 Million worth of advertising on Facebook.
A few years ago Business Strategy Innovation published a white paper to its web site on “
We live in a world of corporations and conglomerates, where most of the employee class has no direct access to the voice of the customer. The man or woman stitching up your clothing has no idea whether the stitching method worked well for you, or if you were happy with the product. They only know whether or not they made their daily quota and how much failed Quality Control. If the person stitching your clothing had access to the voice of the customer, would they do their job differently? Would they feel differently about their job?
It seems like I can’t get through a day right now without hearing somebody in the media or on the street talking about social media. I think it is great that social media has captured people’s attention, but will having more communication channels improve conversational marketing?