More About those Glimmers in the Darkness

December 12, 2008 | by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

[NB to my Faithful Readers: Wednesday's post that was truncated has been corrected! If you missed the last couple paragraphs, they are up there now. Technical difficulties ... !]

In yesterday's post, I alluded to headlines in the business and technical press that made me feel there's a dawn simmering somewhere on the other side of this doom and gloom economy. Here's a sampling:

IT Remains a Bright Spot in Gloomy Jobs Numbers according to Ed Cone of CIO Insight.

Not that IT is the last word in project management - there are plenty of non-IT applications of the discipline that also provide opportunities to streamline, cut costs, and avoid rework - but the Ten Upsides to the Down Economy discussed in Eric Lundquist's eWeek blog display quite a few opportunities for project management (and project managers).

Small and Midsize Businesses Continue Hiring says this eWeek column, noting that despite the economy, small business owners feel optimistic overall. Since, historically, these are the businesses that create the most jobs, and where innovations are born, this is good news. The brontosaurs of the business world are operations-heavy, while smaller, newer businesses race from project to project.

Other articles view U.S. economic challenges from an outside perspective. For example, Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent, interviewed on the Knowledge@Wharton site, remains bullish because he takes history into account, and because of his "outsider" perspective (as a Turkish-American educated in Britain):

[M]any Americans, under siege in the 1970s and 1980s from rising gas prices and economic competition from Japan, thought the economy was falling apart back then as well. "But the system did not collapse," he noted. "America came out of that crisis so much stronger because ... this country and this nation did what it always does best -- reinvent itself and innovate."

More about some of the more innovative projects and products in the news in our next post. Stay tuned.

About the Author

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin is editor-in-chief for PM Solutions Research, and the author, co-author and editor of over twenty books on project management, including the 2007 PMI Literature Award winner, The AMA Handbook of Project Management, Second Edition.

View Posts by Jeannette Cabanis-Brewin

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