Just blame it on the crisis Joe!

As the news remain pretty negative, business and consumer confidence stays in the basement and incompetent senior managers get away with the consequences of past poor decisions by blaming it all on the crisis.

The string of recent bad news from several sectors of the world economy is fast becoming the latest great excuse in companies that are in dire straits for reasons wholly unrelated to the macroeconomic context. Sectors that are still considered to be at least unaffected if not outright favored by the recession, e.g. online and interactive marketing, have their casualties too and it does seem odd that the credit crisis should be invoked to explain lay-offs. In many cases the current difficulties can be better explained by yesterday's lack of foresight, excessive increase of fixed costs, careless allocation of financial and human resources and most likely by insufficient profit margins in the core of the business. So in many cases even though managers blame it on the crisis they'd better take a long hard look at the objective reality 'cause you may blame it on the crisis but in ain't so Joe!