Preparing Today for Tomorrow’s Rebound

Companies can take five steps to evolve from a recessionary “tortoise” to a rebound “hare.”

By Christine Crandell, Engenera

In his fable The Tortoise and the Hare, Aesop teaches us that “slow and steady wins the race.” But in business, however, there is a time to be a tortoise and a time to be a hare. While today’s worldwide recession makes us all “tortoises” now, companies must also prepare to become “hares” before the start of the upturn.

I recently conducted a series of interviews with venture capitalists. Across the board, the VCs reported concern that their portfolio companies were not preparing for the economic rebound. Many CEOs seem to be “gripped by fear” and not taking advantage of the opportunities that are inherent to economic downturns.

Downturns are the time to rethink a company’s long-term strategy and prepare to turn back into a hare before the start of the eventual upturn. After all, companies don’t just want to beat the tortoises in the race, they want to beat the other hares as well.

Read more >>

Developing a Product and Searching for a Market

Jon B. Fisher examines the challenges startups face when trying to compete with established leaders. Read about the merits of carving out a new market in this post to his SandHill.com Blog, Strategic Entrepreneurship.

The Future of Open Source: A New Age of Choice - and Complexity

Jake Sorofman of rPath says the proliferation of languages, frameworks and components in the open source community is creating a software renaisaance. Read why in his post to the SandHill.com Blog on open source.

Publish Your Perspective!

SandHill.com wants your opinions. Send your thoughts on the enterprise software industry to SandHill.com editor, Maryann Jones Thompson (maryann@sandhill.com) and have your opinions published on our site.

Six Ways to Make Web 2.0 Work

Web 2.0 tools present a vast array of opportunities–for companies that know how to use them. Discover new ideas for deployment in this article from The McKinsey Quarterly.

News Update: Software's Schadenfreude

Open source is prospering during the downturn; plus, IBM's staffing, Oracle's buying and virtualization's pricing go under the microscope. Read these stories and more software news of the week in the latest SandHill.com Software News Summary.

Poll: Time to Prepare for the Rebound?

Should companies be preparing for an upturn or buckling down for a long downturn?
Take our Pulse Poll >>

Last week, what will be Yahoo’s ticket to future success?
Give us your opinion and see the results >>

More at SandHill.com:

IBM, others seek open “cloud,” Microsoft opts out.
Read the most important enterprise software industry news of the week >>

Google launches venture capital arm.
Monitor the latest software venture capital deals >>

Citi fuels Red Hat takeover talk.
Size up last week’s software M&A deals >>

Encover named John R. Vitalie president and CEO.
See who’s made it to the top in our list of recent software executive appointments.

Send us your feedback on this newsletter and the SandHill.com site.

Parting Thought

“The worse the economic situation gets, the more the government tries to solve it, the more we laugh at what the government is doing.”
— Malcolm Kushner, on the first-ever decline in his “Cost of Laughing Index”

Courtesy of Malcolm Kusher, The Kushner Group

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