The White Swan

"It seems that the current economic downturn has no end in sight", "jobs will continue to shrink", "the sky is falling"... these statements are being repeated all over the world.

Beware of the White Swan! What is happening today is an inverted situation of the Black Swan (stealing the concept from my compatriot Nassim Taleb). Today, everybody seems to believe that "all swans are black". In this case, what will happen is that somehow, somewhere, somebody will discover a white swan and suddenly things will start changing and quickly. In other words, things might get better faster than we think.

As the doom and gloom bus keeps loading herds after herds of depressed employees, some businesses will discover the situation is not as bad as people think and that the sky is not falling. When this happens, it would be too late to step out of the doom and gloom bus to join the party. So the major question businesses need to be asking is not when and how things will get better, but are we doing everything we can to get ready for when the situation starts turning around? If you are downsizing and cutting costs just because everybody else is doing it or because your finance team is forecasting a decrease in volume, then you are behaving just like in a bubble situation and following the herd until the bubble pops and leaves you in ruins.

Businesses need to learn from the bubble era and apply those same learnings to the current downturn. Many businesses today wish they set themselves up for this perfect storm. So why aren't they setting themselves up for better times?