To all!  We hope this post finds you doing well and we certainly hope 2007 has been a great year for you.  We have been hearing from many of you individually about the deals you're working on.  Congrats to the many of you who are closing deals or are about to!!  It is so amazing to us that many of you are truly going after this Short Sale business.  We are witnessing a level of commitment that is absolutely astonishing!    We all know there is one thing for sure about this business...It has it's challenges!!  Many of you are facing these challenges head on and are successfully navigating your efforts in a direction that regardless of the outcome, you are experiencing a new level of growth, both personally and professionally.  To a certain degree, many of you have realized that Short Sales aren't always easy.   Many of you have also realized that our program isn't necessarily all about building a niche in Short Sales.   Our program is meant to help you develop and run a great business, regardless of whether or not it is in Short Sales or some other business you are aspiring to create.  Regardless of what business you are partaking in, there will always be challenges.   Some of you are facing these challenges head on.  There are others who are simply disappearing.  When it comes to creating and developing a successful business, what is required of most people, both on a personal and professional level, can and will change their life forever!  I recently read a article in the "Harvard Business Review" titled "How Successful Leaders Think" and I would like to share a segment with you.

Harvard Business Review

"How Successful Leaders Think" by Roger Martin

June 2007 Edition

"We look for lessons in the actions of great leaders.  We should instead be examining what goes on in their heads - particularly the way they creatively build on the tensions among conflicting ideas."

"I have spent the past 15 years, first as management consultant and now as the dean of a business school, studying leaders with exemplary records.  Over the past six years, I have interviewed more than 50 such leaders, some for a as long as eight hours, and found that most of them share a somewhat unusual trait:  They have the predisposition and the capacity to hold in their heads two opposing ideas at once.  And then, without panicking or simply settling for one alternative or the other they're able to creatively resolve the tension between those two ideas by generating a new one that contains elements of the others but is superior to both.  This process of consideration and synthesis can be termed integrative thinking.  It is this discipline - not superior strategy or faultless execution - that is a defining characteristic of most exceptional businesses and the people who run them."

"Human beings are distinguished from nearly every other creature by a physical feature:  the opposable thumb.  Thanks to the tension that we can create by opposing the thumb and fingers, we can do marvelous things - write, thread a needle, guide a catheter through an artery.  Although evolution provided human beings with this potential advantage, it would have gone to waste if our species had never exercised it in ever more sophisticated ways.  When we engage in something like writing, we train the muscles involved and the brain that controls them.  Without exploring the possibilities of opposition, we wouldn't have developed either its physical properties or the cognition that accompanies and animates it."

"Analogously, we were born with opposing minds, which allow us to hold two conflicting ideas in constructive, almost dialectic tension.  We can use that tension to think our way toward new, superior ideas.  Were we able to hold only one thought or idea in our heads at a time, we wouldn't have access to the insights that the opposable mind can produce."

"Unfortunately, because people don't exercise this capability much, great integrative thinks are fairly rare.  Why is this potentially powerful but generally latent tool used so infrequently and to less than full advantage?  Because putting it to work makes us anxious.  Most of us avoid complexity and ambiguity and seek out the comfort of simplicity and clarity.  To cope with the dizzying complexity of the world around us, we simplify where we can.  We crave the certainty of choosing between well-defined alternatives and the closure that comes when a decision has been made."

"For those reasons, we often don't know what to do with fundamentally opposing and seemingly incommensurable models.  Our first impulse is usually to determine which of the two models is ‘right' and, by the process of elimination, which is ‘wrong'.  We may even take sides and try to prove that our chosen model is better than the other one.  But in rejecting one model out of hand, we miss out on all the value that we could have realized by considering the opposing two at the same time and finding in the tension clues to a superior model.  By forcing a choice between the two, we disengage the opposable mind before it can seek a creative resolution." 

"This nearly universal personal trait is writ large in most organizations.  When a colleague admonishes us to ‘quit complicating the issue', it's not just an impatient reminder to get on with the damn job - it's also a plea to keep the complexity at a comfortable level."

"To take advantage of our opposable minds, we must resist our natural leaning toward simplicity and certainty."

Folks, we are entering what could be a very interesting real estate market in 2008.  Many of you will step up to the plate and figure out a way to make the absolute most of it.  We applaud you in advance!  Once again, many of you are making the most of this Short Sale niche and we are very excited to see what you will do with your business.

We look forward to a prosperous 2008 and are excited about walking along side each and every one of you in building a great business!

Michael Spickes

America's Home Rescue