Austerity?!

I was an economics major in college (big surprise).  I love the idea that there are immutable flows and forces, which we impact by our very humanness.  One of my favorite economists to read is New York Times Columnist Paul Krugman.  Forget his crazy resume (i.e., Princeton professor, Nobel Prize winner, etc.), what I like best about him is his ability to translate enormously complex ideas into digestible, but not overly simplistic, opinions.  Recently, he has been railing against the world’s push towards austerity when what we really need to be doing is keeping our proverbial foot on the gas.  His last column talked about the craziness of cutting off unemployment benefits when one in five people are still out of work.  And the one before that talking about how cutting spending now because inflation might happen is not even penny wise, but definitely pound foolish.

Who knows whether Paul Krugman will turn out to be right or wrong (although my serious money is on the former), but history, economics and life bear out the following: sometimes the most well intended effort can be the exact wrong thing to do.  Usually, we take the wrong road because the right one feels wholly uncomfortable and alien to us.  The other idea is that culture dictates our bias.  “Tighten our belts”, “suffer for the greater good”, temperance, temerity are major tenets of what we hold as “good” and symbols of our social evolution.  Except when they are not.

It is a hugely powerful lesson for me — what was might be again but what is demands being present to a different order.  In the context of creative business I am struck at just how deeply entrenched the “right” way is to many business owners.  Money and time spent on advertising, social media, and all things marketing prevail over building real, personal relationship with clients, employees and vendors.  Focus remains on what is going wrong instead of what is going right.  There is a refusal to honor the shift that has most certainly happened in your creative business.  It is in a strange (and masochistic) way easier to grouse about what is not working than to focus on what your clients are loving.  Ego makes this step just so hard.  It is why I love economics so much – the trend is larger than you are.

You may never be able to go back to how you did business in the salad days or maybe you will.  That really is not the point.  The point is to ask yourself what you are being presented with today and what you are doing to ignore the opportunity.  There is probably a good reason why.  It might even sound good on paper to you, your friends, colleagues and employees.  Except the moment is telling you to go the other way.  Up to you to listen.