How is Your Workplace affected during a Recession?

You are about to find out.

In my Day One Essay for this month on Mālama, I suspected we would focus on financial literacy and its corresponding  call for better workplace productivity this month:

We couldn’t be timelier with this connection between financial literacy and productivity than right now: Ironically, having the American economy less than healthy at the moment helps us focus, and gives us a sense of urgency and immediacy...
More at our Day One Essay.

This is one of those situations where I would have preferred to be wrong (about the timeliness part), but unfortunately, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke finally came to the recession party yesterday too... late and politically correct, but there all the same:

Time to be money smart
(and Mālama value-smart).
[photo by nickwheeleroz on Flickr.]

This is from Dana Milbank of The Washington Post:

It's (semi) official: We're in a recession.

The Federal Reserve chairman didn't come right out and say it in his appearance before the Joint Economic Committee Wednesday, but in his carefully hedged, deliberate mumbo jumbo, Ben Bernanke delivered a message as stark as bread lines and shantytowns.

"It now appears likely that real gross domestic product will not grow much, if at all, over the first half of 2008, and could even contract slightly," he testified.

It didn't take an economics Ph.D. to crack Bernanke's code: Two quarters of economic contraction is the common definition of a recession. "Am I correct in understanding that you now believe a recession is possible?" asked the committee chairman, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York).

"A recession is possible," Bernanke affirmed, setting the news wires abuzz.

Milbank reported that Bernanke's predecessor has been more direct:

Alan Greenspan wrote recently that the current financial crisis will be "the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War."

Time for us to get to work. Start well with your 5-Beat Rhythm.

You can allow circumstances - like an uncooperative economy - to happen TO you, or you can look for the opportunities to work in better ways, opportunities that better times ironically will not always reveal. Better times can add so much extra clutter (maybe even trapping you into work beyond your means), whereas leaner times help us focus with laser-like efficiency. They also make a lot of people much more understanding about why previous tendencies toward auto-pilot have got to change; that's a good thing!

Let's use this as a good opportunity to re-visit any intentions you wrote down on your 5-beat Rhythm yesterday. Any additional thoughts?

Comments

[Rocky]

I love your statement "You can allow circumstances - like an uncooperative economy - to happen TO you, or you can look for the opportunities to work in better ways, opportunities that better times ironically will not always reveal." Difficult times always make us look at changing. I have a quote I often use "Anxiety creates change" I am not sure where I heard this, but it is absolutely true. Many of the best decisions I have made in my life have come at times of turmoil. For instance, losing a job willmake us think about our skills, abilities, weaknesses, and areas we can improve. If we do not go through difficult times we can often fall into a comfort zone and become complacent. I don't like going through difficult times any more than anyone else, but the difficult things I have gone through have ultimately made me better in the long. I Thosetimes forced me to think in diferent ways and to move beyond my comfort zones.

[Rosa Say]

Rocky, your comment caused me to pull a book from my shelf in memory of something I'd remember reading in Abounding Grace, by M.Scott Peck. He wrote,

“I am often asked why I began my first book with the sentence; ‘Life is difficult.’ My answer is always, ‘Because I wanted to combat the Lie.’”

“The Lie is that we are here on earth to be comfortable, happy, and fulfilled. Is that not our very purpose for being?”

“The truth is that our finest moments are most likely to occur when we are feeling deeply uncomfortable, unhappy, or unfulfilled. For it is only in such moments, propelled by our discomfort, that we are likely to step out of our ruts and start searching for different ways or truer answers —or even for God.”

[Martin]

Fascinating site and well worth the visit. I will be back

[Rosa Say]

Aloha Martin, thank you, and welcome!
We shall look forward to your visits and more dialog.