Why I Like Slowdowns

It's no secret that fast growing markets are also immoral markets. When we spend wildly, we create wide vistas of selling opportunity. It's also not a secret that as market growth slows, those vistas shrink and with them, go a bunch of ideas that sit somewhere on a spectrum of mediocre to outlandish. Could the Escalade or the Credit Default Swap actually have been conceived had we not had a decade or more of decadence?

Rabid market exuberance produces superficiality in gross quantity. I won't begin to list nor will I pass judgment on the visible excesses of the years since the Dow passed 5000. I'm as guilty as the next. I counted no less than 7 iPods and 11 cellphone in my four person household yesterday. This post isn't about things we didn't or don't need. It's about what we need now.

Slowdowns are centering events. Slowdowns force us back to basics. Slowdowns don't just re-emphasize the things that matter, they remind us that in the end, value measured in quality of life is all there is. In that context, leaders are forced to listen and think, organizations are forced to change for the better, and teams see the clear power of collaboration.

Organic creativity is a natural outcome of destruction. At the end of the shaking and quaking of contracting markets are sparkling ideas, some new and some renewed, that improve lives. Consider the family picnic, where kids and parents toss a ball or play tag. Today, it may be a nostalgic rarity. But after a year or two of belt-tightening, you can be sure that parks will be packed, and families will be making memories. That's why I like slowdowns.

- Nicholas Hayes