Everyone I talk to says the economy is their biggest challenge right now. Then I met Steve. Steve owns four small companies in the outdoor sports equipment industry. He has identified precise niches and he holds a leading position in two of them He sees the economic slowdown as a great opportunity.

“When customers are spending less across an industry, most everyone loses revenue, and most everyone reacts in the wrong way. They cut costs, they lay off people, they do anything they can think of to reduce expenses and maximize margins. That creates opportunities for me.” What will Steve do? He plans to acquire his biggest competitor, hire some new key people (who used to work for other companies), and steal customers from businesses that have weakened their positions by cutting too much.

Not all of us can afford to buy out a competitor right now. So what can we learn from Steve?

• Some of your competitors will lose customers when they close locations, cut back on customer service, reduce marketing efforts. Go get those customers!
• A lot of great people are looking for work right now. That makes it a good time to get the key people you’ve been looking for. Look to hire the people you need to grow. They’re out there now.
• Your employees are worried about how slow times will affect them. You don’t want them brooding. Re-engage your staff by put them to work devising ways to strengthen the business. Make it clear that you want to emerge from slow times stronger than ever and you need their help to do it.
  

In short, if you want to make the most of opportunities created by a slow economy, don’t think about how you’re going to survive the slowdown, focus on how you’re going to come out of it in a stronger position than ever.

Forget thinking outside the box. Think outside your brain.

Andy Clark poses an interesting problem in Natural Born Cyborgs. A guy asks a woman on the street, “do you know what time it is?” She says, “Yes, I do.” She then looks quickly at her watch and says, “It’s 10:22.”

Is the woman telling the truth when she says she knows the time? I’m inclined to agree with Clark that she is.

But here’s the problem. A teacher asks his class, “Who knows the capital of Albania?” One student says, “I do.” He gets up, excuses himself, leaves the room, walks to the library reference section, and starts opening books. Forty-five minutes later, he walks back in the room and announces, “It’s Tirana.”

Is the student telling the truth when he says he knows the capital of Albania? most people would think he’s not.

Suppose someone asked you, “Do you know the Capital of Albania?” and you said, “Yes. It’s Tirana.” We’d probably all agree that you know the capital of Albania. You have the appropriate fact stored somewhere in your brain, and you can quickly reproduce it on demand. That’s what knowing something means, isn’t it?

Sure it is. And yet, I’m still inclined to agree that the woman who needs to glance at her watch knows what time it is. With Clark, I’d argue that it’s fair to say that you know the answer to a question if you know how to locate that answer quickly, whether you you have to look inside your own brain or elsewhere.

After all, it does take time to retrieve an answer from your brain. And sometimes it takes longer than others. If I were asked, “What’s the capital of Romania?” I might have to think for a moment or two before coming up with Bucharest. These days, I might even have to think a bit longer than a moment or two. But I’d get it in the end. And I think that should count as knowing, don’t you?

So if it’s not the fact that it takes some time to retrieve the answer that determines whether someone knows something or not, can it be that you have to get it from your own brain to count it as knowledge? That just doesn’t make sense to me. I believe, like Clark, that our minds extend beyond our brains. We ought to recognize that and take advantage of it.

Seth Godin had an interesting short post oh his blog yesterday. Here it is:

Small business success

Three things you need:

• the ability to abandon a plan when it doesn’t work,
• the confidence to do the right thing even when it costs you money in the short run, and
• enough belief in other people that you don’t try to do everything yourself.

That’s it. Short and sweet and pretty hard to argue with.

For many business owners and CEOs, the last point is the hardest. That’s because Americans love cowboys.

One of our strongest national myths is the story of the cowboy, the rugged loner who rides into town and saves the day. It permeates our literature, our films, our music. (Remember, not all cowboys wear cowboy hats). And it’s really dangerous and misleading.

Most good things aren’t accomplished by lone individuals, though we tend to believe otherwise. People usually can’t change the world all by themselves, though we’d like to believe they could.

And let’s not forget the horrible cost to the cowboy. Shane walks away in the end. The lone hero has to remain alone.

You may be the boss, and that may mean that, in some sense, you’re responsible for everything. It doesn’t mean you have to do everything. If you try, you’re probably going to hurt yourself and your company.