The new ecomony (Discovery Bank CEO event)

This morning I went to a CEO event put on by Discovery Bank. They had a hot breakfast for us, and the platform speaker was Reo Carr, the Associate Publisher of the San Diego Business Journal. It's always fun and informative to listen to Reo speak, and I thought I'd share some of his observations here.

His presentation was about the current recession and what was going to happen once the recession is over.

Reo said that there were five words that we had to remember from his presentation:
Mean
Lean
Green
Keen
Faster

Mean- This recession is not going to be like the last one. It is going to change our whole economy. Businesses will have to emerge much more competetive becaue now we will be competing with other countries who have an educated workforce and the technological tools to compete. Namely: China, India, Korea, Brazil, Russia, and Europe among others.

Lean-In order to compete, your business has to run leaner. Toyota is a good example of this. There will be great pressures on running leaner. If you used to have a 10 million dollar company with 100 employees, you will need to go to a 10 million dollar company with 80 employees.

This will bring a golden age for consultants, and companies will start to outsource to help them remain leaner. When the job is done, they just won't renew the contract. Once this recession is over, you can't just go back to what you were doing two years ago. You will have to become leaner to survive, because there will be a much greater pressure on margins.

Green-Being green is now a mainstream concept. We are continuing to populate the earth with the same number of limited resources. Because of this, we MUST do more with less. Being green now has to do with Economics. Here in San Diego we are getting "Water Allocation" (water rationing). This will soon become the norm here.

Most companies can become greener by just allowing their employees to stay home once a week. Think of what would happen to our traffic and oil consumption if everyone just worked from home once a week!

Also, the company wouldn't have to house the employee, pay for heat or air conditioning, lights, parking, etc. etc.

(Reo didn't say this, but there are companies that help corporations allow for telecommuting. They help the employer track what the employee is doing, and keep safe for worker's compensation purposes etc. I have a friend who runs such a company. It's called Home2Office)

Keen- Companies will have to be smarter. There is more competition and they will have to lear to do more with less. Being smarter will become very important.

Faster--The speed of business has increased and is continuing to increase exponentially because of the utilization of computers. (I remember when there weren't any computers in a small business, and I'm sure that some of my readers do too, but there are plenty of younger business people out there who do NOT have those memories).

Because of the use of computers our economy has changed. We will see sharper upturns when the market turns around, but also sharper downturns. We will have a period of learning, where we will have some pain, because right now we do not know how to manage the global economy.

Rio had a lot of other things to say, and there were other great speakers there as well, but this is it for now.

What do you think about all of this?