Recently, almost 160,000 jobs were lost in the struggling U.S. Many executives are slashing and burning both workforce and budgets inanticipation of the worst. Right now, the tendency for senior management is to panic. It’s the only strategy for survival in adverse conditions–whether you find yourself unexpectedly stranded behind enemy lines, or lost up a mountain on the family hiking trip, or facing impending economic hardship as a business. That’s why the armed forces teach all their new recruits the old acronym STOP: Stop, Think, Observe and Plan. Which only exacerbates the economic problem.

Well, here’s what human beings usually do in a situation like this: They panic. With seemingly invincible financial institutions crumbling into dust, share indexes the world over in a freefall of historic proportions and the global economy in the emergency room, what exactly are we supposed to do? But the current financial crisis makes all these other episodes look like storms in a teacup. Sure, plenty of shirts–and trillions of dollars–were lost back then. Forget the Asian financial meltdown of 1997, the dot-com implosion of 2000-2001, the blistering financial scandals of 2002 (a la Enron, WorldCom, et al) and the three-year, post 9/11 global recession that finally abated in 2003. Whoa! This is the big one! Most of us have weathered economic storms before, but nobody has ever seen anything like this.

Storm in a teacup bpm