Horton Hears a Recession

So someone finally came out and said it, we’re in a recession. Well whoopty frickin do, I am so glad you put a name to this funky feeling in my wallet. The truth is, we’ve all known it, we all saw it and with tools like twitter and our big fat BRAINS, decided we didn’t need mainstream media or some bald dude in a suit telling us it was so.

Last night, after I spent the day laying off a good portion of our workforce, I settled in by the fire to read “Horton Hatches an Egg” to my three boys. The oldest one rolled his eyes but I needed something easy and rhyming to ease the pain of my day, since it’s bad form to drink heavily in front of your kids, Dr. Seuss was the next best medicine.

As I read the story of Horton and lazy Maizy, I was reminded of a friend’s re-telling of his story from the last “dust-up” in recruiting. Did he throw his arms up and settle into an easy (but far less lucrative) corporate job? Nope, like Horton, he stayed on that egg through the terrible times, through people telling him it was a dumb idea, through jokes about his profession and lean, cold (economic) winters. (BTW, he emerged as a leader in his field, has resumes when no one else did and made a killing when people were desperate for the talent they had abandoned after the bubble burst).

Of course, since my brain is incapable of doing just one thing at a time, the whole time I am reading this clever little book to my kids, I am thinking. Yes! Here’s a solution! We can use this time (this sucky time, this mess we’ve been left with, that frankly we are leaving to our children but I digress) to shape and mold the industry into what we want it to be!

Yeah, maybe we’ve been doing that (kinda)  but in times of great duress comes great opportunity. Beyond the industry of recruiting, this recession could shape the entire workforce. As gas shot up this summer, we saw entire states change their workforce policies. So why wouldn’t a global recession help to shape the workforce of the next few decades?

Well, it will. And as I finished the story and faithful Horton sees a creature emerge that (against all odds) looks just like him but even COOLER (wings are involved) and is able to finally get some accolades for his hard, faithful and determined work, I realized that I want to have a part in shaping the new workforce, in shaping the new human economy.

As old pillars of the workforce fall by the wayside and folks stuck in the past desperately try to revive them, I have a feeling that it’s no use. Something new will be born during this time and it will be different, and odd, and we might get ridiculed a little. That’s okay. Cuz,

“An elephant is faithful. One hundred percent.”

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