It’s a hot summer day. So sometimes what’s obvious eludes us. After all, the sidewalks are steaming.

Here’s an example from my own role as rainmaker: vSA offers strategic marketing. GREAT, I think to myself. PR with a new emphasis on interactive, really sharp Web outreach, innovative sales tools, advertising… and lots more. Cool.

BUT.

What does a prospect care about marketing, really (perhaps not much). It’s my job to light the fire by determining SPECIFICALLY how vSA can improve the prospect’s situation and life.

As in… vSA bolsters sales, builds market share, helps create thought leaders. vSA makes companies more visible than their competition so they LOOK BETTER than their competition, SELL MORE than their competition, and WIN in a dog-eat-dog economy.

Furthermore, we help make our individual clients ever more successful as executives or business owners. vSA can help them make more money as well as enable them to go home on time more often – feeling good – so they can ride their bikes or float in the pool.

After all, it IS hot out there.

It’s the financial markets meltdown all over again, but this time we can smell it, slip on it and watch the Gulf of Mexico sicken. The two catastrophes have a lot in common. As a nation, we’ve been lulled too far toward  allowing the free market to police itself in high-risk industries. It’s not working very well, is it?

BP CEO Tony Hayward admitted Thursday that the company was unprepared for an accident of this magnitude. In an interview with The Financial Times, he acknowledged that BP “did not have the tools” at hand to stop or contain the spill when it occurred six weeks ago. Of course, BP still doesn’t have the tools.

I’m an entrepreneur and a fan of business, on the whole. It would be splendid if corporations could be relied upon to consistently behave in the best interests of the public. But they don’t. The argument that an unbridled free market is the best option for the economy (let alone the environment) is proving itself hollow. The recent Great Recession and continuing questionable recovery has cost individuals, families, businesses, schools, and state and local governments dearly. We can thank short-term thinking, greed, hubris, and extraordinarily weak regulation of the financial markets for a good deal of what’s ailed us since 2008. Now the largest oil spill in U.S. history highlights the same maladies.

We’re deep drilling when we don’t have either the comprehensive engineering preparedness or the truly at-the-ready remediation tools to prevent destroying our oceans, shores, fisheries, tourism, and more. We are deep drilling with weak safety regulations, some of which were disregarded in any case. Aren’t we any smarter than that?

Leaders – business, government and community – must sear into our brains the truth that next month, next year and the next decade are at least as important as our immediate profits, trades, deadlines, and triumphs.

Boston Consulting Group is just one of the voices we’ve heard recently warning us of the dangers for companies of becoming wildly optimistic in the face of a few positive economic signs. Its study Green Shoots, False Positives, and What Companies Can Learn from the Great Depression “warns CEOs to guard against the kind of hasty optimism – based on an excessive reliance on one or two promising indicators – that undermined some companies during the Great Depression” according to a press release from the firm.

American Public Media’s August 3rd Marketplace show featured a segment on navigating the upturn, in which Standard & Poors Chief Economist David Wyss says mistiming the end of the recession can be a fatal mistake. He warns that “The danger is that in some industries if you sort of stay in self-protect mode too long, you’re going to miss the upturn completely and end up losing market share. More companies go broke in the upturn than they do during in the recession.” However, he then goes on to say that he doesn’t think the fabled upturn has arrived yet. Hmmph, he’s probably right.

So, what’s a company to do? We ask our clients to separate risks too big to assume in uncertain times from sensible business moves that have a way-better-than-even chance of paying off. As a marketing firm, we’ve watched with dismay as some clients have chopped budgets and then complained about anemic sales. (In case you wonder, we ourselves have navigated through client budget cuts by taking on a larger number of clients, including a number of new ones, balancing out the reality that most companies are spending less than they did in 2008, and in some cases, probably less than in 1908.) We’ve used more media relations and other PR, more Web surveys, more grassroots marketing, and a lot fewer big splashy campaigns to get the job done for clients.

Where one Downturn Downfall comes in, we believe, is in paralysis. If revenues are shrunken, sure, reduce spending somewhat. But don’t cut off all your outreach or you will be forgotten by an uncaring world. And if your company can’t seem to decide what product to introduce in this tough market, or when to introduce the thing, GET TO WORK ON DECIDING. If sales are down, sell harder. Sweat still works if you combine it with smarts. The fact that the company down the street announces its sales are down 30 percent, or even the fact that your own company’s sales were down 45 percent last quarter, is not adequate reason to assume that you will inevitably match this depressing performance going forward. Expect more, just don’t spend all your mythical earnings yet.

The economy is an orchestra. It does take a combined effort to make sweet music, sure, and we’re an earplug-worthy cacophony right now. But each musician – from Acme Ant Traps to Toyota – has a singular part to play. Your mother was right. Practice your music longer each day, focus, be open to inspiration, and improve your – and all of our – performance.

Words, conversational styles and mannerisms are important. There are people we look forward to talking with and people we don’t look forward to talking with. And sometimes to differences are so minor, it’s funny – e.g. do you cross the street to get away from me, or call just to hear my voice?

In a Difficult Economic Time Such As This, the importance of good interpersonal skills is even more pronounced than usual. Although, really, isn’t it nearly always better to be a person others enjoy being around?

Here, from the recent past, are some special moments from my friends and associates with people we don’t look forward to talking with:

One:

Prospect (asks the consultant a technical question)…

Consultant (answering question as simply and briefly as she suspects she really must in this case)

Prospect, no longer able to bear the sound of consultant’s voice, or said consultant’s response, or maybe suddenly needing very much to go to the restroom… impatiently says, “ANYWAY…”

Ouch.

Two:

We’re finalizing a sale, making (maybe not brilliant) points, but points nonetheless.

Prospect: “Okay. Shut up. You’ve made the sale.”

Us: “Oh. Thanks. Gosh.”

Three:

Visitor using most sympathetic voice: “I remember when you were younger and had cute little kids at home. NOW what do you do with yourself? Do you ever have any fun?”

Host: “Uh…” (thinking furiously, quite sure he does have fun but suddenly unable to retrieve the Fun File) “Um, sure, I guess!”

Urk.

More don’ts:

-Reminding people they’ve gained weight or look REALLY tired. Or just looking at them with a strange facial expression that says something like, “I forgot about the way your hair always looks so… you know…”

-Telling people who’ve had a tragedy that – hey! – you just heard about SOMEONE ELSE who had a tragedy!

-Moping about the economy and making sotto voice helpful comments like, “is it REALLY AWFUL at your company, too?” Try a more subtle line of conversation.

We can talk about the DOs, too, but I bet we’re not done with the DON’Ts. Are we??

By the way, you look great! Have you lost weight, or fallen in love?

Enjoying your day?

More smart? Smarter, that’s it.

I guess I knew this, but I forgot. Some of us, and I suspect this includes many entrepreneurs and creative types, work way better under pressure. Not only that, we learn so much more when we suspect it’s vital, not when we’re feeling la-di-da. We also learn more when there are fewer people on hand to help us, like when those people are really busy doing their own thing that we’ve already assigned to them, or maybe they’ve thrown in the towel and moved to a faraway island. (And I’m sorry if I caused that… really I am. You know who you are.)

About learning under duress, stress and the rest. I’m of the generation that grew up not attached to a keyboard. No, I had to learn the hard way – as a young adult. And I’ve gotten pretty good at installing software, troubleshooting, even making an incompatible printer work with my Mac! (Four hours it took, four full hours!) For 2009 business planning in Dismal Economy World, I know it will be important to reach out to clients and prospects in a whole range of ways – from speaking engagements to media relations, mailings to direct personal outreach.

Even as a veteran marketer, I learn new skills when I have to perform unfamiliar hands-on tasks. Like running a slide projector (this is the stuff of nightmares for a verbal learner with no mechanical skills whatsoever). You’d think that the scary part of speaking in front of a large crowd would be… speaking. But for me it’s displaying that damnable PowerPoint presentation. IF I have one.

So, in the perpetual interest of finding something lovely in nearly any situation – just think how much you’ll learn this year! With so little support! How many new horizons! What an enhanced professional you’ll be. Me, too, I hope.

Pulling together a clever game plan is taking awhile.

Step 1: I decided to look over my investments. Being thoroughly up-to-date, I have everything accessible online. Being thoroughly a coward, I hadn’t looked at any of it in… oh, shall we just say, quite a while.

Step 2: Returning from the kitchen, now with a paper bag into which I expect to breathe for some time, I sat down to think. I thought about simplicity. I thought about how much I enjoy my work, and wondered if I will still enjoy it when I am 86.

Step 3: I realized I don’t like simplicity all that much. No, I needed facts. An action plan. And thus I began my research.

Step 4: My financial advisor, whom I trust, said it’s hard to predict what will happen next and how long recovery will take. NOT GOOD. Like a student seeking her guru, I continued my search.

Step 5: I assumed the major investing publications would help out. What sectors are good? What kind of a time window is needed to recover while staying largely in equities? Should I sell my jewelry on the streets of Springfield? I hoped to find the answers to these and more deep questions.

Step 6: “The answers” I have found

Big Oil: We told you so.

If you can learn from the mistakes of others, now is a great time to be an investor.

Dow 20,000 or 5,000? (Author doesn’t know)

I’ve also learned that I should: use Quicken, keep putting lots of money in my retirement plan (kind of like dumping sand into a big wet hole you’ve dug on the beach, but okay), and look at exciting vehicles such as whole life insurance (who needs ACCESS to the money when you know it’s somewhere out there?)

Step 7: What? I’m taking a nap now. Let me know when I should wake up.

Storms pass. Really, they always do.

Marketing is an interesting business when times get stormy. I’ve been doing this for awhile (okay, forever) so I’ve been through a few downturns and emerged with my company battered but intact. In the process, I’ve learned a few things, usually a bit late and always after a good deal of capital, both monetary and intellectual, has washed away.

What I’ve learned in general:

-Some companies will cut marketing budgets. Very few of the best companies will eliminate marketing budgets.

-Some types of marketing look smarter than others in a downturn – we’ve talked about this before – informative, feedback-based, solid, non-hype-y outreach is the way to go now.

What I’ve learned each time the economy has tanked since my 1979 college graduation:

-1979: I should have learned to type and skipped Tufts entirely.

-1987: Having too many of one type of client (commercial real estate development, in this instance) means that when that industry crashes, my firm may get as much as zero cents on the dollar. As, in fact, was the case. Urk.

-2001-2002: Oh, my my. Were we ever overstaffed! Were we ever too slow to downsize! And were we ever interested to see we could do as much work AND make as much money, with fewer people. Wow.

-2008: Panic is ridiculous. The markets are getting carried away now. Innocent people are selling their 401 (k)s and locking in huge losses. But I’m betting that, by about this time next year, we’ll have a reasonably stable, reasonably prosperous economy again. There’s too much government intervention, all over the world, to repeat 1929.

I’ll bet you haven’t thought about T.S Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in awhile. Okay, maybe ever. But listen to this!

… time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

This morning, standing in line to purchase my $3.52-plus-tip latte, I thought “But we’re going to have a recession! No! A DEPRESSION!” but I bought it anyway because it’s really good. And I’m really tired and, well, feeling a little negative this morning.

But this is how it begins. Do I dare to eat a peach? (Yeah, Prufrock again.) Day to day, most of us trust the government to be foolish BUT NOT THIS FOOLISH. We trust the markets to not shoot down to negative numbers (hmmm, can that happen?)

And then when we find out we’re wrong, we stop buying lattes, we don’t travel as much, we don’t buy that new house. Bosses don’t hire new people, people don’t start new businesses… and the economy tanks. Its engine relies on all of us.

So THAT’S why I’m doing my part. Lattes for the sake of the nation.

Please… do your part. Your government lacks the will!

A new American Research Group poll indicates that zero (yes, that’s 0) percent of Americans think the economy is getting better. I suppose the specter of a $700 billion bailout will continue to cast a long shadow on public confidence. There’s a good argument, though, for adopting a certain dogged optimism. At the risk of sounding like McCain when he recently said the economy’s fundamentals were sound (oops), I’ve been through enough downturns to know that our economy is a massive machine with great momentum. Further, I think our emotions play a big role, and that “group negativity” deepens and extends periods of economic gloom. For example, as a business owner who works with corporate clients, I remember well that 9/11 was almost immediately followed by a freeze in corporate decision-making and an end to many marketing outreach programs. Why? Fear. Certainly, the economy was already in a tech bust, and 9/11 was terrifying. But I strongly believe that we worsened our situation by, in too many cases, putting the brakes on normal activity. I virtually never think George W. Bush is correct, but when he told Americans to “go out shopping” after the attacks, I reluctantly agreed with the motive behind the message. I didn’t want our economy to be yet another victim.

I think we’re at another turning point. The financial mess the U.S. and the world have gotten into is bad, of course. However, my firm’s clients are still selling a lot of products, I’m still buying groceries and shoes, and, as I look around, I see some people are still buying homes and getting new jobs. Let’s keep a sense that we can empower ourselves. Let’s also assume that the sky isn’t actually falling, just sagging. Let’s assume the stock market will lurch back into a positive trend over time. As business people, consumers and human beings, I believe we have the power to keep ourselves moving forward economically – despite it all.

… Only this time I’ve started worrying it’s me that’s stupid… okay, maybe not stupid exactly, but ill-equipped to be an investor in these times. Not that my concern will stop me – My greed (oh, must I call it that?) outweighs my caution when it comes to stocks and mutual funds.

Remember poor Mr. Bill from SNL? He's been investing. "Ooooh nooo!"

But here’s what scares me. Commentators such as Andy Serwer, speaking with Anderson Cooper on CNN, postulate that the market has become so complex, with its derivatives, complex mortgage securities and arcane computer modeling, that even the top people at investment banks and other firms DON’T COMPLETELY UNDERSTAND THE INSTRUMENTS and how they’ll work. Kind of like artificial intelligence gone mad… or Frankenstein’s monster… Ooooh nooo!