Survival of the fittest

“You can help me. Whatever comes out of these gates, we have a better chance of survival if we work together. Do you understand? We stay together, we survive.” roared Maximus Decimus Meridius to his fellow gladiators. He was the General, who had commanded some successful campaigns earlier, but now he was an ordinary gladiator just trying to survive. He was standing with other gladiators waiting for the gates to open. No one knew what was going to come, when the gates will open. The gates opened and chariots came out and encircled those groups of gladiators. These chariots moved in perfect sync and gradually moved towards firing arrows in the direction of group of gladiators. But gladiators formed a circle inside a “circle”. As the chariots moved closer, they found the weakest link (instead of becoming a weakest link); they attacked and destroyed their enemies.
The noose of recession is getting tighter day by day. “Worse is yet to come” declares every other newspaper and everyone is feeling this pressure. We are all gladiators now. Individually as a person or as an employee of the company, may be as an employer of the company, as citizen of the country or as a one of the nation of this world, we all are gladiators. The gates of recession have opened unexpectedly and the chariots of economic crisis are hovering around us. All the calculations have gone wrong, the graphs of growth are touching ground zero and everyone is clueless, pondering over the situation “What will be the next?”
The future depends upon the overall attitude, how this situation will be handled. This has happened in past, but sometimes it was wisely handled and situation improved. Other times, it created a platform for the World war. In the times of globalization, if everyone tries to find a short-cut to survive, he might survive for some longer time, but finally he will get sucked in the tornado of this ongoing crisis. We must learn to stay together, if we need to survive. Individually we must prepare ourselves for the worst conditions. Mentally prepared and strong person is always stronger than able-bodied person, because in crisis he exploits his strength and works to overcome his weaknesses. One good thing about recession is that it treats everyone equally. During the boom, there are some princes and there are some paupers. But in recession, everyone is a pauper. So the pauper, who takes the risk in right direction, becomes the prince when the economy recovers again. Boom and bust cycle can be compared to the day and night cycle. During the day, we work and when the night falls, we relax our body and mind by going to sleep. This recession everyone needs to go into hibernation for some time. By hibernation, I do not mean inactivity, it means ideating over future market requirement. There exist simple rule in the economics “Give the market what it wants and market will give you what you want”. Necessity creates a market and market starts growing. In this competitive world, everyone tries to feed the market as much as it can. Eventually, overfed market suffers from constipation, and this is what we call recession. But there are still some segments of market, which are still hungry, only thing needs to be done is to find those segments and feed them so that we can survive.

On an organizational level, layoff is not a permanent solution. It will help to control the situation temporarily, but when the market bounces back, existing staff will find new opportunities. Cost cutting is better solution. The employees are wise enough to shoulder the responsibilities, if they are taken into confidence and made to realize current scenario. Investing on training the human resource is always a better option. It’s like preparing soldiers for future war. So when the economy recovers , the employees are ready to take the challenge and execute the projects effectively. Infosys and Wipro were growing companies during the last recession. While the whole IT industry downsized their experienced staff, Wipro and Infosys hired experienced people and encouraged them to train the freshers. The profit margins were not that great during that time, but they ensured that they survived. This created a layer of managers and software developers, who were a great asset to company, when economy boomed last few years.

On the national level, the government of every nation should undertake some economic reforms. The bailout packages must be designed in such a way that it not only helps the industry, but it should also a help those workforce that are working in that industry. Many people claim that Mr Rajiv Gandhi was the man behind the IT revolution on our country. But in reality, the economic reforms in form of tax sops to IT industry undertaken by Dr Manmohan Singh in 1993 boosted the IT growth in India. The Government should encourage and help the start-ups in form of tax benefits, so that these startups can survive this crisis. Who knows that today’s start-up can be tomorrow’s big industry player in the market. Countries like Pakistan, who are on the verge of bankruptcy, should ensure that they don’t create an atmosphere of war. If the war breaks out, these countries will be erased permanently from the global map.

This recession is a blessing in disguise for every person, every company and every nation. Only it depends upon their attitude, how they handle this crisis.