Can Good Come From the Recession?
October 8, 2008 by Simon Ashton
Filed under All, social media
One of my regular reads is Jacob Morgan’s blog – I’ve mentioned him before on here – as he usually has something interesting to say, and he’s very prolific too. Most of his posts take a inquisitive tone, he asks for opinions or thoughts from his audience (which is a great way to interact), and he appears to be generally optimistic.
Which is why I was pretty surprised by the apparent anger and ‘doom+gloom-ery’ in this post.
Don’t get me wrong, I think everyone is pretty angry at having to bail out private companies, and then see them blow $400,000 on a spa retreat. I doubt many felt a great deal of sympathy for the Lehman Bros CEO after he was punched by an employee on Sunday (not that we condone violence, obviously!). Right now anger is perfectly understandable.
But anger, as John Lydon used to sing, is an energy, and that is where I think I differ from Jacob on this one.
His blog was a response to this post on O’Reilly.com, suggesting that the recession will be good for innovation. So to some degree it looks like they are talking at cross-purposes. Saying that a recession is good for tech+innovation isn’t the same as saying that a recession is a good thing.
For example, I think I can safely assume that most people think the Second World War was a ‘Bad Thing’ – the Holocaust, 100s of millions of lives lost, the beginning of the Cold War, etc, etc. The closet we have seen to Hell on Earth.
And yet it is also undeniable that those tragic circumstances were good for technology and innovation – the birth of the modern computer, jets, nuclear technology, medical advances in skin grafts, antibiotics, the birth of the Space Age and so on. People can debate whether or not those things would have happened anyway, but it is true that the war speeded up the process due to necessity, and the same can be true of a recession.
The last recession wiped out jobs too, but (just in the Internet industry) some of those talented people working behind the scenes at Pets.com, Flooz.com and other sites which seem like jokes now, have gone on to create much greater value at Google, Yahoo, Ebay and other success stories. Who knows what great things will be invented by a programmer who gets laid off by AOL, for example?
Nobody wants a recession. I feel enormous sympathy for anyone who is suffering at this time because of things that are beyond their control. But I am (naively?) an optimist. I like to believe that when people are pushed to find new ways of doing things they will. I think that history has shown that this country is better equipped than most to allow new ideas to become great. Yes, many will be hurt be the coming financial problems, but some of those people will use that as a springboard to achieve something wonderful, and that will help to lift us all out of the recession.
After all, this is a country where even bank robbers are finding innovative uses for Internet services. I’ll continue to have faith in the power of people to overcome adversity through technology.
I think this is a great post, as I believe there is a reason that everything happens. So perhaps there is a greater purpose here that we will find out years from now. I also think, going with the whole there's a silver lining to every cloud theory, that this will help people become more efficient. I recently had a client tell me that planning for this downturn encouraged them to “cut out all the fat” and that actually they are much better for it.
For my selfish purposes, I hope people start to realize the exorbitant cost of traditional advertising and see that while advertising has its place, word of mouth techniques like public relations and smart use of social media tools reap much larger benefits over the long haul. Take this time to evaluate your business and marketing plans, cut the fat, reallocate resources, and gain some market share while everyone else is freaking out.