Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Building Reccession Resistant Small Business - Part I

Last couple of months , the mainstream media is continuously bombarding with words like recession, foreclosures , credit crunch ,rising food prices, share market fall , financial crisis . It is successful to build a mental state of 'fear' on recession globally . The media have even walked ahead and started comparing with the patterns of great depression in 1930 . They may be right and they can be wrong also . But , what is remarkable is the kind of negative sentiment of scarcity it has created in last few months . All these years we have been hearing that the natural resources are scarce . Now we have reached in collective mental state , where even the monetary resources around the world is scarce. It proves the fact that when we start thinking scarcity , we add more to block of scarcity . One of my friend , was telling me that in last 2 weeks he is not trying to look at newspaper and TV , and pulling himself hard to concentrate on the project where he could make a difference. I think ,it is the most wise thing to do , to prevent the economic reccession to take the shape of personal reccesion.

I think recession is a testing time of mental approaches. Often when a recession comes in a macro economic level , it gets converted into organizational and individual level very fast . I was a part of dotcom industry when it was hit by recession in 2001 . Suddenly, every customer of our organization , was scared about us, who were buying different line of web consultancy support . Though the kind of a recession which we are having at that point of time, was a correction of the inflated valuation which was associated with dot com industry . It has nothing to do with incorporating Internet as a part of Corporate strategy to reach out different lines of customer base , which we are offering to the market at that point of time . Yet , we are badly hit .

I know from my personal experience, that it was hard to call an motivated team member, and tell him about the pay cuts which is going to happen from next month . It created such a negative energy all around the team. I continued observing how the recession in the organisational level , is getting circulated in personal level . There were no longer training camps and extended group discussion where we felt a common bonding , about how the organisation and the project we are doing, was important to us .

Often ,organisation in the time of reccesion ,takes a very hard approach towards thier tangibles . It is the most smart thing to do . But when the tangibles like money get scarce , it had to meet up by intangibles , like time and good advise that the organisational motivation stays intact . It is this which makes a difference between a sustainable business and unsustainable one .

There is also a need of changing our mental approaches from scarcity to abundance . Recession is a testing time for of our collective mental attitude towards scarcity . If we collectively think , something is scarce, it has multiplier effect, and then we see everything around is scarce . Our collective mind has a enormous power, to turn a thought which is bombared by mainstream media into a collective thinking pattern . So , the modern media and global connectivity has a huge negative multiplier effect , which will definitly add on to the reality of the global reccession .

That's to build reccession resistance the individuals and institution has to nurture the thoughts of prosperity and abundance and realise that universe is abundant . Infact ,to take a more practicle example we have to look at the our body and the different organism which functions in the body. Could they be valued in reference to money ? As says mastercard ad ... ' which I liked very much ' there is certain things which money can't buy' - it can't buy a starry night , it can't buy true love , it can't buy your exact body.

We have to understand that reccession is a mental approach . Unfortunately ,our economic theories are based on this mental approach . The fundamentals of economic understanding is based on scarcity . We have to raise questions about the validity of these fundamentals ,otherwise the world can never get out from the trap of economic reccesion , though the nature is always abundant . There is requirement of new theories which is based on the ideas of abundant thinking .

( To be continued ..)

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