When I hear about millions losing jobs due to the global economic recession that is plaguing the world these days, I find myself thinking about everyone who lost his or her job and how would the life be for that person. How would that person survive in the coming months ? More so, if that person has a family. What will happen if a family runs out of money, worst if it runs out of credit. What will happen if someone is not able to find a meal at the end of the day. Those are some really bad thoughts I have sometimes. What makes them horrible that they might actually come true. All I can do is to dismiss them in a hope that the situation will improve. The stimulus package will work and slowly people will find the jobs they are looking for.
There are some things that we might need to consider when it comes to us having putting up our expectations from the coming months. One of the most important is that everyone wants to save money: Businesses being in the front row. Second thing to consider is that our world is becoming more and more connected by the day and these connections are becoming cheaper as we speak(god bless the market competition). Globalization is the name of the game. Planning and designing in one country, produce and package in another, shipping and delivering from yet another. That is how profit is achieved in the fiercely competitive and global markets in these times.
When and if governments start imposing restrictions on the way businesses operate, business owners are left with no options but to close down or to resort to work around these restrictions because if there is no profit there cannot be business. If a business can get a product’s raw materials and build it at a different location from the country in which the product is sold at a significant profit: That is the way the business will operate. If that is not an option, business will seek the next most profitable option. However, if the only edge that made the business prosper was the profit that it was gaining out of production in a different country, choosing the second option would not be possible. That will just drive the business out of profit and out of picture. This, I think, will be the fate of a lot of businesses, if governments start imposing country specific restrictions on different businesses.
What needs to be done however is that, going forward, projects and businesses that cannot afford to lose profits are need based and not greed based. The meaning of this is that a project or a business is started because people really need something that the business produces (a commodity) not what would have been a “good to have” something (a luxury). If we look specifically at sectors like IT, we can see all around a lot of projects that could easily be classified into the category of luxury applications.
From a leadership point of view, I think that going forward, we will see much more mature budgets which take into account what is really needed. World leaders would have to encourage global trade and try to create a niche in certain segments. This would come through experience gained after carefully investing time and resources in processes that have the potential and the power to hold and drive the economy forward on a global scale. This also means that countries which would be smart and understand that differences within themselves are good for nothing and just hurt their impression in the global market would be able to constantly make progress compared to countries which keep on grappling with their own issues. There would definitely is an issue of international responsibility but unless countries which need help don’t really make an effort to identify themselves as strategic players in the global economy, any amount of outside help that they will get is going to be useless because in a competitive world the only thing that drives progress is business interests and not charity.
Corporate leaders across the globe would have to reach a level of maturity where they can see and understand that not everything in this world starts as a million dollar project. The research and development departments of the organizations would have to be more focused on the needs of the organization and deliver more often and would have to work close to the production more than ever before. This way the companies would be able to ensure that they don’t spend on something without doing their “due diligence”: To make sure that they are not jumping in blind. This would help in bringing about a better transparency and accountability to processes since businesses would better understand the nature of how resources are tracked through a process.
From an individual point of view I see people becoming more aware of the global nature of the competition that they are facing. They should understand that a business would always try to make profits, granted that it should not be at the cost of quality. In a global market when the deliverable is something that takes anywhere from just a few milliseconds to a day be delivered from any part of the world to anywhere else on the face of this planet, giving a country specific preference to the people who do it not only becomes impractical but also something that’s not really profitable. Understanding these facts would help people bring up something in them which is at par with the global population that they are in line with to compete.
Weather it is focus on quality or innovation or it is the speed of development/production or the amount of data processed or the special attention on security or making sure that projects are delivered on time. These are the attributes of developing world ready products that will separate true talent from the rest. This really is what will guarantee job security for individuals and stability and survivability for the global market and the economy. It’s going to be a rough world out there and it will still be “survival of the fittest”.
Posts
