Survey confidence?
On 24th August Kate Burrows posts "Business confidence drops" - the results of a recent survey conducted by the Institute of Chartered Accountants England & Wales found.
On 27th August Steve Myers tells us that the European Business Awards find there is growing confidence in amongst businesses.
On 29th August, Colin Millar poses the question "How can anyone have any faith in surveys when, clearly, we cannot have this dichotomous outlook of the future for British businesses"!
I'm interested in the impact these surveys have businesses across the UK- does your organisation follow these research reports and make strategic decisions based on the findings or would you commission your own research before making any business decisions?
Is this where large businesses outgun SME's who can't afford to undertake complex and expensive market research and then turn this into product / service development?
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I'm incredibly sceptical of these kind of surveys Colin. Isn't it amazing how they always seem to fit the agenda of the company sponsoring them?
Absolutely and I meant no disrespect to those who posted them (as I have done similar myself in the past) so I hope no-one has read it that way.
When thinking about it, the stark reality is that the surveys are most likely conducted in a very small geographical area or with such a small sample group that it cannot possibly represent the real picture across the nation.
I liked the comment in Management Today about the new coalition Government having to be more wary of their constant reminders that deep cuts and thrifty policies are on their way as this may actually be having a detrimental impact on recovery. A very salient point I thought.
There's a danger that we encourage the prophecy to become a reality through repetitativeness and reinforcement rather than allowing people to make up their own minds about whether or not they have the confidence to go out and spend money.
I tend to take these things with a pinch of salt. It kinda suggests a fatalism about business that doesn't reflect reality. I mean even if so called national confidence is low it doesn't mean that your business or your industry are going to be suffering, much less that you have to accept the fate handed to you by the media.
And as if by magic, another one by PwC
http://www.managers.org.uk/news/pwc-uk-facing-even-tougher-year
Gotta laugh haven't you?
What I have increasingly noticed is that no-one ever seems to offer any sensible or viable solution. We're now dealing in doom and gloom rather than someone coming to the fore and telling us what we need and where we can get it or how we can go about making it happen.
Isn't that the intrinsic role of leaders?
We all know there's a recession and that we need to reduce the nation's debt. We all know there are practicalities attached to this i.e. reduced spending; increased revenue and / or profit. That wasn't that hard to work out.
What no-one appears to be prepared to do is tell us how we can find a way of out it all.
Stating things like the public sector will need to cut back spending as it'll be receiving less money is another negative. Private sector will need to take up the slack - ok, we're starting to get somewhere. Now all we need is something less vague.
You get a sense of "every man for himself" so far and that's not very "Big Society" really, is it?
Covey stated that one definition of insanity was to do what you've always done and expect a different outcome. We're stopping what we've done for the past 13 years in favour of what we done in preceding years but we seem to think we'll emerge better; fitter; stronger. If it doesn't work, remind the public that the finances were in tatters when you came to power as if placing the blame somehow makes it all better.
It doesn't really matter how we got ill now - what does matter is that the medicine makes us better, so it needs to be the right diagnosis and the right remedy.
There must be a way of doing something slightly different and getting positive results? I don't know what the answers are, but if I thought people were working hard to identify them, perhaps I'd have more confidence that there was a solution.
The doom and gloom stuff is counter-intuitive if you want people to feel positive - just look at the results coming from surveys in employee engagement. Perhaps a bit of "societal engagement" before we go for the altruistic "big society"?
Why don't we survey the population and see what they want (or was that the general election)?!?