It’s not about the lipstick it’s the hog that matters!

Every­where I look lately I see another Guru offer­ing up another ver­sion of “how to suc­ceed in tough time”, usu­ally in form of sim­ple check lists. Today I received a cou­ple of them in my e-mail and I was struck by their sim­i­lar­ity and real­ized that what is going on is every­one is say­ing that their lip­stick works best for chang­ing the look of the pig of our cur­rent cul­tural shift. In doing so for the most part they ask us to have “faith” in their lip­stick with­out address­ing the nature of the pig, they want us to assume that all pigs are alike and we all see pigs in the same way. Thus mak­ing their par­tic­u­lar solu­tion to the prob­lem the only one or the best, or the most magical.

The lip­stick solu­tion is based on

• The assump­tions most peo­ple look for the easy way to solve prob­lems, the way that seems sim­ple at first and appears to offer a quick solution.
• Fear gen­er­ated by the impend­ing changes
• Mag­i­cal think­ing that if you ignore some­thing “bad” it ceases to exist.
• One size fits all think­ing ( a mind­set that is still stuck in the Mass approach to prob­lem solving)

So before you take up the lip­stick take a look at the prob­lem, exam­ine it through your eyes and your life then look at the lip­stick to see if and how it can be adapted to you. If it still doesn’t change things or requires you to be some­thing else other than who you are (not a pig) then toss it out! It is far eas­ier to approach prob­lems and bumps in the road when you have clar­ity about who you are and what makes you tick.

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Tagged as: Business, Education, Marketing, Marketing strategy, Pig, TGB