Happy New Year! And welcome back to SSON. Did you miss us?
So here we are, at the beginning of what we’re all hoping will be a much better, more profitable and more stable year than the last… Admittedly the omens aren’t good – so my haruspices tell me – but I’ve given up superstition for New Year, along with BASE jumping and the conga and hard-headed realism: with that in mind, everything’s going to be FINE!
I’m joking, of course – about the hard-headed realism, that is. You can never have too much of that (unless you work for Pixar). Of course, as we established a couple of weeks ago, it’s pretty difficult to make accurate predictions in such tumultuous times and I’m certainly not going to hold my hand up and insist everything’s going to end up this year either rosy or wretched: I simply don’t know, and unless I’m very much mistaken neither do you…
One thing I do know, though – thanks to a remarkable book I read last week: Risk: the Science & Politics of Fear by Dan Gardner (I’m aware I’m well behind the curve on this one but those few of you who haven’t read it: do so, it’s eloquently informative and entertaining in equal measure). That is, we all worry too much. Sounds pretty obvious but it’s true nonetheless. Despite all the trauma of the credit crunch, the current turmoil in the Middle East, and everything else that seizes us by the unmentionables every time we turn on the TV, this is by some distance the best-ever time to be alive as a human being.
To quote my fellow blogger Phil Fersht’s post from today: “It’s time to shake off the gloom.” We’re richer, healthier, safer and basically better off in almost every way than we’ve ever been, says Gardner – and my New Year’s Resolution is to start believing it.
Crunch shmunch.
Tags: 2009, BPO, crisis, financial, Offshoring, Outsourcing, PhilFersht, predictions, Shared Services, sharedservices, sourcing, SSON
