Business
Forrester: The Best Defense For Business Leaders During The 2023 Economic Downturn Is A Proactive Offense
To navigate this downturn, CEOs will need to simultaneously reduce spending while continuing to invest in their organizations’ long-term strategy CAMBRIDGE,
About this update from Forrester Research, Inc.
[{"type":"text","content":"\nTo navigate this downturn, CEOs will need to simultaneously reduce spending while continuing to invest in their organizations’ long-term strategy\n\n CAMBRIDGE, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--\nAccording to Forrester’s (Nasdaq: FORR) “Navigating The 2023 Downturn” research, the current global downturn will unfold in ways unlike any economic decline previously experienced. While prior recessions have followed a boom-bust cycle, the 2023 downturn immediately follows a pandemic that has already disrupted business models and forced organizations to pivot their business strategy. Additionally, multiple factors contribute to the complexity of this downturn, including inflation, energy costs, supply chain challenges, regional conflicts, and changing worker demographics. These factors will uniquely combine across regions and industries, ensuring that each country will experience it differently.\n\nNew research from Forrester offers proactive measures to help business leaders across technology, marketing, sales, customer experience, digital, and security and risk effectively manage this downturn. Specific guidance for CEOs includes:\n\n\nStay focused on long-term strategy by making smart cuts and smart investments. When facing prior recessions, many leaders imposed cuts across the board. This brute-force approach is likely to hurt more than help, however. Many leaders also assume that, as they make cuts, they can’t pursue new investments, but in reality, this moment is ripe for CEOs to do exactly that. In addition to establishing a customer-obsessed objective and then making smart cuts with that objective in mind, leaders should move forward by investing in technologies that can improve customer experience, employee experience, and productivity, even as others choose to stand still.\n\n\n\nPut talent at the center of the long-term strategy. Currently, 54% of US workers and 43% of both UK and French workers believe that their organization will make personnel decisions in a careful and human-centric way. When considering cuts, CEOs should identify the individual contributions and skills that will take their company into the future and invest in a talent intelligence program that thoroughly tracks worker skills and performance capacities.\n\n\n\nChoose the right customers to obsess over. During this downturn, CEOs must realize that it’s equally ...