Wind of Change

I don’t want to believe that 2009 started and nearly 2 months are almost over. I still feel we are still in 2008 with all its troubles, negatives and sadness. The reason why I think so is because of the following reasons:

Globally, the economic crisis is even getting harder; the trillions of different currencies injected in the financial systems so far did not revert or at lease stabilize the situation that makes everyone wonder why? One thought that might explain n this fall is of Seth Godin in his great piece “Small is the New Big” when he anticipated what happened by saying:

“We bought the idea that all the good stuff that people look for from an organization—job security, benefits, vacations, the safety of being able to blame your boss when things don’t go well—could be accompanied by the rush of fast growth and the heady feeling we get when the bureaucracy gets out of the way and we get to discover what we can really accomplish. We lionized the 28-year-olds who were pioneering new products or launching new divisions. We envied the lucky (but not particularly skilled or risk-taking) middle managers who made a fortune with stock options. We called ourselves intrepreneurs, smiling because we were getting the best of both worlds. Wrong. Very wrong. Wrong because we missed two big ideas. The first idea is that big companies are fundamentally broken. Big companies are big companies because they’re very good at doing yesterday’s business. They can make (and sell) their stuff faster and cheaper than the competition because they’ve gotten good at making and selling their existing products. The problem is that when the world changes (and it is changing faster than ever) being good at yesterday’s business isn’t just useless, it’s a liability. All those big companies are sweating now, because the infrastructure they built is about as useful as the Maginot Line—it’s obsolete. Penguins like cold weather. When it gets warm, they’re stuck. The finely tuned machinery they developed for one environment won’t work so well in a new environment. The second idea is that the stock market has been broken for just as long. The stock market is a huge mass-psychology scam, dependent on the fiction that there will always be someone stupider than you, willing to buy those shares for more than you just paid. A key part of this scam is the generally agreed upon principles that investors seek. At the center of those principles is the idea that big companies with predictable earnings are likely to continue to grow and thrive. This used to be true, of course, but in a chaotic world, it’s proven wrong every single day. The bottoming out that we’re living through is a direct consequence of these two ideas becoming very clear to us at precisely the same time. Big companies can’t keep growing forever at 20% a year perfecting yesterday’s business, but the stock market didn’t want to hear about that. So the big companies, with the direct encouragement of the accounting firms, lied about their results (yeah, lied is a strong word, but that’s what it’s called when you don’t tell the truth). All along, while we were giddy at the huge expansion we all enjoyed, we were missing the real point. And now we’re paying for it.”

You can read the whole thought in Seth’s blog.

Regionally, before 2008 ends, as if it doesn’t want to leave us without one more crisis, Israel started its attack on Gaza strip. The outcome is 1500 deaths and around 7000 injuries. The most important outcome is the moral damage it created inside each human being who witnessed this massacre. Why this happened? So many announced reasons but the hidden ones are much more. In my point of view, Israel aimed to destroy the mental and emotional abilities of Arabs and deepen the disagreement between Palestinians themselves and among Arabs in general even if it did not score a clear physical victory like what it did to Lebanon in 2006. In a recent report, it was estimated that Arab counties lost almost 21 Trillion Dollars as a direct and indirect cost of Arab Israeli conflict since 1991 !!! I think you understand what I want to say.

Personally, 2008 was another difficult year both on professional and social levels for me. There is no place here to talk about it but I think it was really a challenging year with a lot of conflicts and hard decisions to take.

At the end, the only ray of hope was by the inauguration of Obama as the 44 president of USA. The Israeli attach stopped one day before that. The first day for him on office, he closed the horrible Guantanamo Bay prison and hired a messenger for Middle East peace reinforcing his commitments during election campaign. Then, his is fighting to approve his bail out plan to rescue American economy that will surely reflect positively on all worlds’ economies.

So when we see this happens, we can say welcome 2009. Tell then, we have to heave in 2008 aftershocks !!!

Tarek