The Other Direction From North

Diesel Progress North American Edition, April, 2001 by Mike Osenga

Ouch.

The Nasdaq Nineties are most definitely over.

Truck sales are down.

We're hearing 1980s-sounding noises about layoffs and plant closures.

My 401(k) has become a 201(k).

Off-highway sales are flat.

The stock market's a train wreck.

The business isn't growing 20 percent a year.

What in the heavens hath God wrought?

It's called a downturn.

It is not the end of the world. It's not the cessation of life as we know it. It's not the death of the industrial world.

It's a downturn. We don't know how deep or for how long, but sales are flat, down a little or down a lot.

Somebody turned the arrow around. It's the opposite of up, the dark side of boom, the other direction from North.

And it has some people really, really upset. But what they're mostly upset about is that it's happening on their watch. "Why a downturn now! Why me?"

There's also the fact that a lot of people are going to retire within 10 years. Thus this is not a great time for the 401(k) to have minus numbers under the Net Change column.

The scariest half of the equation may be the fact that if you started your job since 1992, like 45 percent of the people in this industry, this is an all-new experience.

It's scary. It's uncharted waters. Bad management practices are more readily apparent. But the fundamentals, the underpinnings, the structures are still intact.

Dust off the textbooks and look up the definition of Business Cycles. It says nothing about sales and profits always going up.

But in recent years it seemed like that was the case. And maybe a little hubris crept in. Maybe we started feeling that we were better than any previous generation of business people, that the old cycles were gone, and we could sustain this forever.

Turns out the cycle just took a decade off.

The fact is, that even given the unprecedented (pause please and muse upon that word), even given the unprecedented growth of the last 10 years, the arrow was always going to eventually turn.

Go ask someone over 45 if this has ever happened before. Gasp! It has. And they lived through it?

It's a downturn, and at some point, maybe even this year, things will start to look better and we'll be able to talk confidently about how we managed or endured or survived it all. I hope.

We'll be business veterans. And we'll be saying to those just entering the business, "you know you can't take growth for granted..."

Mike Osenga

mosenga@dieselpub.com