"Headwinds" Jumps The Shark

Stanley Bing is a columnist for FORTUNE Magazine and may also be read on a daily basis at www.stanleybing.com

The Wall Street Journal starts our week with one of its classic observational front page stories. This one notes the prevalence of a new metaphor that is now running like grain through a goose through the CEO community. It seems impossible to describe the current business environment without using the word "headwinds".

For instance, the paper quotes Rick Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, telling auto analysts on January 17: "As we look out, we've got to be realistic that we are facing some tough headwinds, particularly here in the U.S., with a relatively weak industry." Jerry Yang of Yahoo and G. Kennedy Thompson of Wachovia are also invoked, among others.

Business does this. I remember when I started out in business, you had to have excellence. Everybody had to have a (usually pristine and unread) copy of Tom Peters and Robert Waterman's lengthy, repetitive, preachy tome on the subject, In Search of Excellence, on proud display on their desktop. No meeting was complete without a segment in which people talked about excellence, the drive to achieve excellence, and a lot of cheering and hand-clapping in recognition of those who had in some way quantified or demonstrated extreme excellence.

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Comments

[themodernleader]

Business once abided by certain clearly understood rules that made possible a decent, if not glamorous, living standard for millions of middle class businessmen.
With the advent of predatory capitalism and shift to money and banking, only conglomerates and off-shore manufacturing were allowed to dominate economic activity. All else became a racket of buying, dismantling and re-selling after the middle class employee' savings and futures had been looted. Millions of small business men disappeared.
Now the final stage of that era is at an end. All that is left is debt, indebtedness, a scrotched earth of destroyed industry and losing competence, poverty and hopelessness all around. Our Federal Government is bankrupt and at the mercy of foreigners.
Such is the lesson for those who have followed leaders who promise everything for no sacrifice, and who untie restraints on wealth and power with the prediction of wealth and prosperty for all.

[realitytrumpsbull]

Set up the tent sites and the soup kitchen...