Situational Psychology - 6) Getting Serious
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This week’s topic, serious situations, focuses on the psychology of seeing new opportunities in the overlooked value of our position. A lack of money drives our awareness of this situation, but, as we will see in today’s story, this lack of money arises from the continual change of climate. In our personal life, this often happens when we lose our jobs. In our businesses, serious situations can arise from different sources, but there is only one solution to the serious situation, but as we will see, it can be applied in a number of very different ways.
The psychology that leads into serious situations is a complacency. As I have explained, our minds are lazy by nature. When our methods are working, we expect them to keep working. Since they win rewards, we only value the resources that make those methods valuable. However, when the climate changes, the resources we have been using become less valuable. We must change our perspective to find new forms of value in existing resources.
The Changing Climate
Our story of serious situations is the business of publishing comic books. It starts with a lead character, Martin Goodman. As we will see, he knew how to adapt to change as his comic company pinballed from one serious situation to another, always finding a way to survive.
After Goodman worked his way up in magazine publishing in the 1920s, his employer went bankrupt. He adapted by becoming the part-owner of a pulp magazine company, selling westerns, mysteries, sports magazines and so on. In 1939, he began publishing comic books under the label of Timely Comics. At the beginning of WWII, Timely Comics had a very successful character who fought the Germans, an action hero named Captain America. The sale of those comics died quickly at the end of the war. However, by that time, Goodman had already started dozens of separate lines of comic books that followed the latest trends in television and movies: horror, Westerns, talking animals, giant monsters, crime, and sports. He labeled his group of different comic book ventures as Atlas. At its peak, Atlas was publishing around fifty comics a month.
Then, Goodman faced another crisis. In 1957, Atlas’s comic book distributor went bankrupt. His only alternative was a company Detective Comic, his largest competitor. They would only agree to distribute a dozen titles a month, a small fraction of Atlas’s output. The result was that Atlas’s income fell to a fraction of what it was. This is the very definition of a serious situation.
Fortunately, in the sixties, action heroes became popular again, and Atlas developed a host of flawed but popular superheroes, Spider Man, the Fantastic Four, the Avengers, and so on. Goodman consolidated his different comics brands under the name of one of their shell companies, Marvel Comics, but, because of their distribution deal, they were still in a serious situation. By 1966, Marvel Comics was bankrupt.
Short-Term Survival at a Long-Term Cost
Goodman survived using the only response that works in a serious situation. Unable to sell more comics, to survive., he needed to see his competitive position from a different perspective.
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