In this day and age, there might be something visionary about being old-fashioned.  Old-fashioned doesn’t necessarily have to mean stuck in an imaginary past, where a sense of purpose comes from trying to keep things as they are.  It can mean something much more creative, hinting at a kind of steadfastness at adhering to the time-honored values that have stood the test of history.  At the risk of repeating history, we sometimes fall into the fashion of constantly reinventing things, when in fact, it might be more radical to place more trust in the things that worked for us before.

This is certainly helpful in corporate training, when so much of the contemporary theories about systems and customer service turns out to be nothing more than twaddle when it’s all ironed out.  Of course, as a species we grow and evolve, and we do move into the future all the time.  This has never been more true than it is today.  But we do so by trusting in the things that worked before.  The test of time can be our greatest ally, even in times of great transformation.  The things that worked for our parents’ generation may not work for us, when you get down to it.  However, the things that worked for our parents and our grandparents may, in fact, be exactly what we need for the present moment.

It’s an interesting contradiction to consider that one of the most revolutionary things we can do, in sales training today, is to mine the past for those things that have always worked.  With a little bit of foresight, and hindsight, we can recuperate the values that have withstood the tests of time.  There is no doubting that we are at an unusual point in our history, where new technologies are changing the way we do things.  It’s also true that the things that customers have always valued, like trustworthiness, honesty, friendliness, and courtesy, will never go out of style.  With insights from the generations that came before ours, we can move into the future, riding on the shoulders of giants.

Shoulders of Giants is a post from: Surfing The Channel

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