Coping with the recession

I was just going through my blog and looking at my last post on the recession. While I feel I did manage to say what I felt was gonna happen with the economy, I must admit I myself did not feel it would be as bad as I feel it will be now. I did not realize the number of people who had leveraged themselves on the way up and only now do I get some sense of the chaos as they de-leverage or re-leverage. Anyhow, thought I would write about how I am trying to get my companies to cope with the recession. I don't know if these are the right strategies or whether we need to do things a bit differently. If you have any suggestions, please let me know:-

1. We're trying to get everyone to focus on personal productivity. That means all people staying more focused on work, working smarter and using better IT tools and managing schedules and meetings more effectively.

2. Doing more with less. We're trying to of course cut flab wherever we can but more importantly redirect senior resources from slightly more futuristic projects to areas which are very critical and need the involvement of senior managers. So for instance, our Business Development team is aiding the sales team, the revenue team is working with the Back office and I'm personally doing business development and product management.

3. We're engaging more with our customers at a strategic level. The good thing about the recession is that most of our clients and partners seem to have some time to meet in a relaxed manner. I'm trying to meet as many of them as possible to understand what their top priorities are in these times and how we can look at modifying our offering (if required) to help them to meet their new 'recession time' goals.

4. We're pushing hard on new offerings while not growing the technology team. To a certain extent this is a dilemma. On one hand, we feel that no new competitors will come up and so we are not running against the clock and on the other hand, we want to launch quick and when there is not much noise around. Our technology team here has been really good. They're a bunch of good developers who are highly motivated and committed to the cause. We're lucky to have built such a team.

and lastly, though I wish we were doing more of this

5. We're trying to keep the team together and get them to celebrate the cheaper things in life. I want to do a lot more of this but I think we've made a beginning in a small way this month.

Do let me know if you have some more suggestions on how to cope. We're trying our best as this doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon.