Open a newspaper or an industry site these days and you will find yourself awash in a sea of doom. Everywhere you turn, there are reports of impending collapse and industry decline. It pretty much doesn’t matter what industry you are in. Everywhere you look is covered in a thick layer of FUD.
I am old enough to remember what businesses went through in late 1970s, and the early 90’s and several more times in the new millennium. There is a cycle that doom-sayers follow almost as regularly as the tides.
In the downturn of 2008, I saw the effects on my own business. It was a nightmare. Waking each morning to find more forecasts of impending doom in the papers and across the news. A self-fulfilling prophesy, really. The more the news and financial pundits talked about how horrible the economy was, the more company leaders believed it, and eventually they made changes to buffer themselves against the FUD as if it were real. It was perhaps the biggest lesson I have learned in marketing and market forecasting. If you can convince a group that something is true, that group will make it true for you. All the FUD tossed about in the 2008 decline caused companies to pull back spending for years, cut R&D, lay off staff, and go into cocoon mode to ride out the coming storm. That, in large part, enabled the forecasted storm to happen. Economics and psychology are so closely linked that they might as well be the same as far as I can tell.
Today, well actually these last months, we have seen the FUD building once again. The reason is unknowable – it could be political or someone wishing to take economic advantage. Perhaps it is simply news agencies looking for content to increase ratings. It really doesn’t matter why. What matters is how you respond. Are you going to be manipulated by the fear, uncertainty, and doubt? Are you going to make decisions that limit your plans and growth? In every decline, there are companies that don’t pay attention to the FUD. They are the ones who get the advantage over their competition. Walmart, Sony, Taiyo Yuden, and others. They did not stop growth planning when others did, and they came out ahead in the end.
More than a decade ago I gave an invited talk at a military conference. They were interested in developing a vertically integrated communication ecosystem for the battlefield so that, for instance, planes would know where troops were and could easily coordinate activities. I challenged them to think outside the mainstream flow and take an honest look at the shortcomings of several of the wireless technologies that companies were promoting as ideal for the situation. I asked them if they wanted to be sheep and follow blindly. Let’s just say that bluntness and honesty don’t always pay off and my advice was not received with open arms and smiling faces.
The concept I shared in that conference is the same as I am sharing with you here: do you want to be the sheep or the wolf? There will always be plenty of both in the business world. The sheep stay in a flock, where togetherness provides the false assurance of safety. The wolves, well, they loosely follow the sheep, but only to prey on them. Wolves follow their own agenda, regardless of what the shepherd writes in industry rags or shares on the 5 o’clock news.
As you sit here reading, think about whether you want to be part of the flock or do you want to stay your course to a reasonable degree and come through the FUD ahead? It may very well be that you have to adjust your business just a tad in the coming months, since most of the world buys into the FUD. If you completely go your own way, you will end up too far from the sheep to prey on them. But if you maintain your frame and keep your eye open to take advantage of opportunity, you will come out of this current tide of doom and gloom ahead and be positioned for exceptional growth after the FUD stops.