universality and the odd case of conformity..

With the current economic slowdown now that monetarist fundamentalism is recalibrating with Keynesian reality, the lack of boldness appears rather surpising. On a large scale companies are postponing decisions to engange on projects. While waiting their providers loose valuable time and resources, and as a consequence may spiral into bankruptcy depending on their scale, general policy, or stage of development. Enthusiast voices advocating doing things smarter are held back by this hopefully temporal caution. Again, initiated by the monetarist tendencies, the stock market, or other forms of financial agenda driven company policies such as anal retentive CFO's, companies seemingly awaiting financial results for the first quarter of the calendar or financial year, take a deep breath of relief when noticing that the economy itself has not collapsed, nor has their company, and engage on projects and avoid a downward spiral where the left hand is waiting for the right hand, and vice versa..
Some companies will move forward before this quarter is announced, some just after, and of course some may wait out the whole financial year following the forecast the whole economy will bounce back sometime September 2009.

Sounds reasonable, but the amazing thing is that it's not so logical as it seems.. psychologically in emergency situations some 15 % of people will turn into leaders, some 15% will turn completely irrational, and the rest will follow either one of these groups. But companies have already filtered people out within their organisational hierarchy, so the people in charge are more or less made up of the 15 % leaders. Studies in creativity also show some 10 % of people have a capacity for unbriddled creative productivity, the upper ten if one prefers to apply a vertical oriented yardstick. Considering unproductive people don't so much bubble to the top of a company, disregarding the level of competitive politics a company pervades, again the people in charge should be in the group of the most creative. Ok, have dealt enough with middle management to know this is highly idealized, although it doesn't quite say in which direction these people are creative leaders..
So howcome if it's recognized things need to be done smarter, that it actually can be done smarter without much extra effort, howcome companies are just waiting it out..
Here we get into some an odd aspect which seem to pervade modern day society, self empowerement. People have this tendency to confirmity, to fit in, and show that they do. Which is pretty odd, in the sense that people tend to overdo it. Pick two random humans and they are the same for more than 99%.. they will point out the same bluest blue, and the same reddest red, if having migraines they'll see the same circular forms appearing.. If they have their ears open they'll get swept away by the same music. The same brain areas will be triggered for the semi-religious experience involved with advertising of the new iPhone...
Likewise, apart from the financial industry getting a welldeserved beating up, although many of the affected banks who received a governmental injection still produce profitable figures, go figure, practically everyone seems to be talking about a slowdown instead of a crisis.
But if this slowness continues, a real crisis will result.. as innovation happens at the bottom, and if these small companies and individuals aren't pampered into proving themselves via projects, then there goes the spiral again..

So, maybe it's time to ditch the fashionable echo-ing of authorative opinionators, the trend to scatter around spineless quote as if standing on the shoulders of giants, and just get to work. And hopefully a bit smarter as well?
Echos get so hollow when resounding too often, and so does this slowdown.

Simple, ain't it ? It's springtime, go flourish.

emtpy, empty, happy, happy