Will the last economist left, please turn out the light

Some bright spark from the International Monetary Fund made a statement which has to go down as a ‘flash of the bleeding obvious’. He stated, that the current financial malaise is being driven by a “global lack of confidence”. From a body which is supposed to advise on future financial likelyhoods, that has to go down as the master of all understatements.

I’m no economist, thank God, nor am I as eminent an authority on any matters financial but even blind Freddie (sorry Fred) knows if you keep sowing the seeds of doom you’ll at best slightly dent people’s confidence. Sadly, this austere body is only telling us what are, in fact the consequences of their own advises. In the past four months these so called experts have changed their forecast three times.

Now for me when you change your first forecast you’re admitting you got it wrong and when you change it a third time it means you’ve got it wrong twice. So why do we keep believing these masters of error.

I don’t like recessions any more than anyone else does but creating fear and talking up the problem does not help because people react. Tell them it’s all crap and it’s a self fulfilling prophecy.

So how do you deal with what ‘Ziglar’ once called the SNIOP (Subject to the Negative Influences of Other People). Well, I have difficulty with that to. However I assess what’s happening around me and I think in what I like to call, ‘Einstein Think”. He said (And remember he was brilliant), “We can’t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”

If we’re in a pickle then we need to think differently and I don’t see the solution coming from some international forecaster based in Washington USA, who was part of the problem in the first place. I mean no disrespect but in a macro sense it isn’t forecasters and economists who are going to get us out of this mess – whatever mess that is? The people who will likely get us to a new beginning are the entrepreneurs, the champions of ideas, the creative and the flexible strategists who defy the gunfire of government and financial authority and take their business into their own control.

Mr Rudd, Mr Turnbull and all the other so called ‘leaders’ can’t help us, but we can help ourselves by listening to new ideas; by championing change and thinking in a whole new way, never dulled or deterred by what the stumbling experts, who don’t know what’s happening from one day to another, say. I think we need first to understand that they are only the predictors. It is us who are the initiators, the inventors and the conceptualisers. In terms of current thinking we see the macro as driving the micro when in fact it is the micro that creates the macro.

In terms of marketing and promotion some will say this is all big picture stuff. But wait, is it? Why do some companies adapt, sustain and even gain during recessions? Einstein had the answer and it was this, “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. In this case it’s pretty obvious that those with the so called knowledge have fouled it up, it’s our turn now and we’re using
our imagination.