The Crisis
Lehman Brothers is gone, AIG is a ward of the state, and the banks I used to pitch storage strategy to are not returning calls about anything except survival. I am not an economist. I sell consulting and infrastructure to large companies, which means I get to watch the crisis arrive as a calendar event: projects frozen mid-signature, purchase orders recalled, “strategic” initiatives dying in the order they were announced.
What the freeze teaches you about this industry: in good years, companies buy the future. In bad years, they buy only uptime. Everything I sell is being re-sorted into those two piles in real time, and the second pile is much smaller and much more honest.
From this side of the Pacific it looks different from the New York version. The factories here are slowing because the orders stopped, not because the credit did — the crisis travels by purchase order as fast as by cable news. Hong Kong’s bankers are calmer than their counterparts at home, which may be information or may be manners. I report; I do not know.
My own situation is plain: a practice to build in a season when nobody wants to buy anything optional. So the advice I am giving clients is the advice I am taking. Keep the systems running. Keep the data safe. Cut everything that does not protect revenue. And be the person who answers the phone — in a crisis, trust is the only line item that grows.