It’s time to talk about success
Jan 27 2009 By Jerry Blackett
It’s not quite on a par with remembering where you were when you heard President Kennedy had been shot and Princess Diana had died.
But for a while I will remember that we started the quarterly council meeting of Birmingham Chamber of Commerce at 9am on January 23 with a light-hearted announcement from our President that we had 30 minutes left before we were all officially in recession.
At 9.30am the GDP figures for the fourth-quarter of 2008 were to be announced and, as expected, these pushed the United Kingdom into the accepted technical definition for recession (two consecutive quarters of GDP decline).
I was interesting to hear Peter Jay (a past British Ambassador to Washington) explain on BBC Radio 4 the other day that there is, in fact, no science behind this technical definition at all.
It dates back to the start of the Great Depression in the United States in 1929. After GDP had declined for one quarter, the-then US President, Calvin Coolidge, was so concerned not to enter an imminent Presidential election with too much bad news that he invented the requirement for there to be two consecutive quarters of decline before there could be talk of a recession.
The technical term for this is “saving your skin” but ever since, we have been led to believe that the calculation is steeped in some economic theory.
Back to the Birmingham Chamber meeting. What became clear as we discussed local trade and industry is that the picture is much more complicated than is portrayed by the media.
Of course, we can see the problems and I don’t need to rehearse these again but why do we not here more about the businesses which are doing well? For example, a local manufacturer who now has a 12-month backlog of orders because he can’t keep up with the demand from China, where he supplies into the mining and aerospace industries?
China’s economy may be down but it is not out. With GDP growth still forecast at around seven per cent, China is concentrating on spending internally, on infrastructure. Add in a cheap pound and you get one busy local business.
In other feedback, we heard that hotel bookings in Birmingham this month are three per cent ahead of January last year; a global civil engineering business has just opened a new business concentrating on refurbishing tired buildings; web-based advertising volumes are growing and a foreign bank (yes, a bank!) has put on 400 new jobs in the last12 months in Birmingham with plans to grow this figure to 1,000 by the end of this year.
I am going to think hard about how we capture these stories so that we can shout loudly about them. A lack of confidence is holding too many good businesses back. Confidence underpins performance, whether personal or corporate and it is our collective job to build back confidence as quickly as we can.
If the definition of a recession is the figment of a desperate politician’s mind then let’s invent our own definition of a recovery. How about “when we all decide it is over?”
* Jerry Blackett is chief executive of the Birmingham Chamber of Commerce
