Global Recession: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review

 

Introduction

FINDING OPPORTUNITY IN ADVERSITY

by Martin Reeves

Most business leaders have little experience to draw on when managing their company through a recession. Even those with the longest tenures have only faced a handful of major shocks, each with different causes and effects (just think about the contrasting dynamics of the Great Recession and Covid-19). Lacking experience, they often fall back on intuition to guide their behavior. Unfortunately, evidence from past recessions shows that these apparently reasonable intuitions are often misleading and sometimes severely damaging. Four of these mistaken ideas crop up most commonly.

First, leaders often see recessions as temporary deviations from their company’s long-term competitive ...