It’s that time of year where business leaders and other interested parties are asked to comment on The Budget and I suppose, with my interest in macro-economics, I should pass judgement.

 

But I would rather ask a question.

 

The politicians have all started to realise that we are not only living in an Age of Uncertainty but also entering a decade of austerity to restore the country’s finances.

 

Whatever the real numbers and forecasts on jobs, growth/recession, inflation/deflation, public debt ratio, borrowings, fiscal this and monetary that, there is no doubt that we are going to have to change government behaviour to adjust to the new reality. Furthermore, this will not be a quick drop in and bounce out, but after a long period of growth, we are in a new reality that will continue for some considerable time.

 

As business people, I think we should not worry too much about what was, or wasn’t, in the budget, whether it was or wasn’t good, bad or ugly, or whether everything was optimistic/pessimistic in it, but rather we should take the lead from the politicians and ask ourselves a question.   The country, the world and all its constituents are changing behaviours to adapt to the new reality, so how do we adapt our businesses and business models to respond to these changing attitudes and customer behaviours? After all, the customer is always King.

 

That’s the message from the budget – ask yourselves what you need to do? How you will do it? And then adapt and hopefully survive and prosper.

 

 

 

 

Neil Anderson

MD, Qcom

This entry was posted on Friday, April 24th, 2009 at 9:04 am and is filed under Business Strategy, Market observations. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.