I’m reminded of JCP about fifteen years ago. Was the company ill? Absolutely. Did Management understand what the problem actually was, much less the solution? Nope. As a result, they burned the brand down to the ground, taking eighteen billion in net sales and turning it into thirteen billion in net sales. The five billion in sales never came back.
Should we find ourselves in a recession in the next few months, somebody within your company will want to “burn it down”. Not on purpose. They’ll think they are helping. “We need to conserve money, let’s reduce the marketing budget by 40% and figure out how to be more efficient, yeah, that’s the idea, and let’s cut back on new product development by 30%, that’ll save some money and we’ll create an efficiency director position to facilitate our transformation during these economic headwinds.” They’re not helping. They’re burning it down.
The people who burn things down are not the people who build things. You don’t hire the people who blew up the Kingdome to build T-Mobile Park, do you?
Back in the dot.com implosion I was asked to downsize my team by the CFO. We were losing $30,000,000 a year on net sales of $300,000,000 so you can’t really argue with the logic, but I did challenge the individual to demonstrate that my staff were the reason we weren’t profitable … I could prove my entire team was generating profit. That line of reasoning didn’t go well, but the CFO did demonstrate to me that he wasn’t trying to burn it down. One of the people I fired, as her final sentence as an employee, said to me … “I used to believe in you“. The sentence haunts me to this day, and for good reason.
If recession arrives tomorrow or in a few months, make sure the decisions you make align with “building something”. There’s no reason to burn it down … if burning it down was the right decision, there was nothing to stop you from burning it down six months ago when the economy was humming along, right?
