John Linton
...or merely rueful understanding that life, and business go on a long time irespective of what the artificial horizons of financial planner's year end targets might try to suggest?
I've been talking to more people than usual over the past week, partly because I was away for a week in Sri Lanka and Singapore and didn't accept any phone calls in that time and partly because several large suppliers (and therefore the people who buy from them) are affected by trying to reach various annual revenue and profit targets which end in March and April. Telstra's half year gloat-fest was also a contributor I suspect though the numbers reported by the TMT didn't seem particularly interesting as, halfway through a major internal change program there would be no reason for them to be.
The overall impression I gained in the conversations I initiated and the conversations initiated by other people was one of 'tiredness' or, if I was given to more flamboyant and emotional descriptons, something bordering on 'defeat'. So many of the people I talked with, about quite important things as far as I was concerned, expressed views that were, at best, ambivalent about the coming 1 - 2 years and ranged from uncertainty through several more negative 'shades' to deep pessimism about what they/their company's could/would be doing about various initiatives and market sectors. Maybe it was my imagination; I was certainly very, very tired and mildly jet lagged from a very demanding and stressful previous seven days (long past the days when I could fly across the world, landing at Heathrow at 5.00 am, renting a car driving to Bristol, quick shower and coffee and in the office by 8 am and then 5 days of hard work and harder play before returning to Australia, a nights sleep then back in the Sydney office by 7.15 am with no visible or actual degradation) so I might not have been able to separate my personal weariness from what I perceived to be other peoples 'lassitude'. (alternative meaning of lassitude: Way of regarding young women?).
Perhaps it was my satisfaction with the outcome of the Sri Lankan trip and the fact that for the first time in a great many years I had spent a week where I had to be both very positive and very persuasive in meeting after meeting using everything I've ever learned, or been genticaly gifted with, to get the results Exetel needed from a wide variety of government and commercial entities. I certainly haven't done any of that for a very long time and perhaps that made me overly sensitive to anything remotely negative in the people I talked with when I got back to Australia.
My overall impression of several major companies (and several companies that appear to consider themselves as being major) was that they weren't meeting whatever targets they had set and didn't think that some of the decisions they had made were going to turn out well. Each person I spoke with seemed to be worrying about something slightly different but, in the whole of the week, I didn't hear one positive view. Maybe a combination of the fact that the USA is actually already in recession, the affect that has had on local share prices and the eve more frantic "free" offers pervading every aspect of the communications industry is producing a period of more than usual gloom?
Then again perhaps the sky really is falling.
However I think that isn't either true or even likely - we are having our best ever month in terms of new orders and retentions and I don't think we are an aberration. Maybe my extremely positive current outlook (conditioned by a week of having to be uber-positive in getting what we needed from our business dealings in Sri Lanka and Singapore) is colouring my view of more rational people.
Anyway - a lovely Saturday morning in Sydney so let's not waste any more time inside gazing at computer screens.