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What do you think? Were we born at the right time or wrong time?
I decided to find the answer to this question.
In 2008, when I started university, the crisis broke out.
My parents and friends, as maybe yours, often complained about the recession.
So I interviewed 26 bank CEOs, each for a couple of hours.
After these interviews, I realized that even they didn’t know everything.
They thought of themselves as economical gurus but this strayed from reality.
The touch of the crisis is described best by the answer of one of these CEOs:
„It came down like a stone-axe.”
According to the interviews, the first touch of the recession can be divided into two parts:
the fall of 2007 and 2008.
As the crisis broke out in the fall of 2008, this part is more interesting.
I asked them, that if they knew in the fall of 2007 that there would be a problem,
why didn’t they do anything.
One of the interviewees gave me the answer.
Since in 2007 there was a prosperity cycle in the economy, if they would have initiated cut-backs and severity,
they would have lost their jobs by the time their decisions would have turned out to be right.
By the way, through the interviews, several interesting mistakes came up.
Imagine, there were leaders that thought that the expansion of the economy would never end
and that the crisis could only affect other people, surely not with them.
Some of them thought that the crisis would last only a couple of months
and that they just had to survive and everything would end up alright.
Some banks lacked conscious communication,
where the word „crisis” couldn’t be pronounced in the bank.
But the most interesting was the one,
where planned intern training costs were cut.
Since education only has long-term effects,
there is no need to deal with it from a short-time perspective.(says ironically)
On the other hand, I heard many interesting and positive stories
which I drew a lesson from,
and I would like to share some of them with you now.
One of these lessons is that
you should always be sober and take care of conscious communication.
A vice CEO told me a story about
when he and his collegue were talking to each other before lunch,
they were chatting about tennis, kids, private life topics.
After a few months, their co-workers said,
that this was the best thing that they could do
because in the middle of the crisis, when there were management meetings every other day,
they could stay calm and talk about everyday things,
and this told people that they could stay untroubled as well.
So take care of your communication,
as you can never know who are effected by your words.
The second lesson that I learned is that
you should always question everyday routines.
One of these CEOs told me that in the middle of the crisis, he decided that
he will chose a different route to go the office every day.
So he stepped into the office every day with the attitude that
he’s always searching for new possibilities.
By the way, at the end, he realized that he would have had to eventually go backwards along one-way-streets
to fulfil his pledge.
The third lesson is the humour.
Through one of the interviews, I stepped into an office
and there was package on the table, a crisis package.
I asked him about it,
and he told me that if a client came in and asked him what they could do as a result of the crisis
he would give them this crisis package and tell them:
„Here is this pack, it contains a fishing rod, toilet paper, tissues and matches. It solves all your problems”.
So, I hope you find your humour-package
that helps you when your life goes downwards.
Were we born at the wrong or the right time?
It depends on whether we think about the crisis as a possibility or as a threat.
Through our student years, we believe what our pessimistic friends
the media, or books tell us,
that the crisis is a negative, a bad thing.
Through the interviews I realized that CEOs
always look at both sides of every situation, in search of possibilities.
Be open to different opportunities and possibilities
—these make you successful.
Were we born at the wrong time?
It only depends on you.