Risk-inverse
We’re in a recession. Lawmakers are scrambling. Businesses are in a hiring freeze and suddenly we all own a little piece of AIG. Everyone is hunkering down and preparing for the worst. The phrase “especially in this economy” is the new black.
Translation:
Great ideas and opportunities are being left on the table. Few people want to take chances right now. And when everybody plays it safe, the ones that go dancing in the rain will come out ahead when the storm clears.
Example:
During the dot-com bust, instead of cutting back and laying people off, Apple did the opposite. They kept their existing talent and upped their R&D budget. In Steve Jobs’s words:
What I told our company was that we were just going to invest our way through the downturn, that we weren’t going to lay off people, that we’d taken a tremendous amount of effort to get them into Apple in the first place — the last thing we were going to do is lay them off. And we were going to keep funding. In fact we were going to up our R&D budget so that we would be ahead of our competitors when the downturn was over. And that’s exactly what we did. And it worked. And that’s exactly what we’ll do this time.
There’s no better time than now to make shit happen. Zag.
