You have everything planned. Strategy is brilliant, wheels are turning, projects are in motion, future is unrolling. You feel good and can almost taste success. Unexpectedly, something big happened: two big buildings collapsed, a hurricane wreaked havoc, an earthquake shook a romote place, something called sub-prime is disturbing the US financial institutes. The event has no direct effect on what you are doing, but everyone is talking about it. Should you change your course or stand firm to ride out the storm? Since there is no data to support either decision, it is essentially a gut call, wrenchingly.
Guts are quite a rare commodity these days.
The question is whether the event has fundamentally changed the course of the world, or it is merely a ripple to be forgotten.
Sequoia advised their portfolio companies to change. In fact, to jump immediately.
If the event altered the landscape. Companies that reacted quickly also recovered quicker. Companies that tried to ride it out experienced painful cut-backs and frequently never recovered. There are many examples. Studious readers have already listed both columns. The million dollar question is, “How soon will this economy recover?”
You know Sequoia’s answer by now, “Not soon enough for you to just do nothing.”