Recovery or Not? Your Toughest Business Call
Like weather forecasting, predicting the economic recovery is an inexact science. This fact is especially vexing now as businesses start to make strategic bets based in large part on where they think the economy is headed. Make the wrong guess and your enterprise could be rained upon for a long time.
Who do you believe?
In the April edition of Harvard Business Review, financial adviser Eric Janszen, president of iTulip, says that if you are hanging your business strategy on expectations of a near-term recovery, you are playing a loser's game.
"Companies planning for sudden and relatively near-term growth should reshape their strategies to make the best of economic flatness," Janszen writes in Welcome to the False Recovery.
Even as the U.S. savings rate increases -- seen as a sign of optimism by many economists who think this money will eventually fuel consumer purchasing -- Janszen believes consumers are instead using this money to pay off debt. It's not a harbinger of growth "but rather a drawn-out malaise that will soon become something like a lost decade."
Just as you start believing those words along comes a face slap, like today's very optimistic news reported in the New York Times, Upbeat Signs Revive Consumers' Mood for Spending. The reporter concludes, "Consumers are no longer restricting their budgets to necessities like food and medicine. They are starting to buy clothes, jewelry and even cars again." One economist marks the mood of American consumers as "almost giddy."
I'll tell you who is not giddy. Anyone who is responsible for formulating business strategy based on such conflicting data. Should you plan for a long recovery, and thus potentially miss out on a year of delirious shoppers throwing their wallets at anything wearing a price tag? Or should you beat your competitors to the rising wave of consumerism, but potentially face disaster if the latest spending numbers are short lived.
I think if we've learned one lesson in this crisis, it's this: In uncertain times, risk management is a strategist's best friend. Look, you should trust your own gut and what your customers and business partners are telling you, to guide you going forward.
But take baby steps, and always be playing your risk management scenarios should the economy tip one way or the other. What will you do if banks start lending again? What if the Fed starts raising interest rates? How healthy are your suppliers, and what would you do if one or two went out of business? What new partners do I need to ride this thing out?
Forget the economists and analysts for a moment. What is YOUR prediction on how the economy will play out over the next six months, a year, five years? And how does your strategy reflect that forecast?