21 Jan Don’t Panic!
Today I received the email blast from AIGA asking me, as a ‘design leader,’ to fill out this quarter’s survey for the Confidence Index. I did not have very confident answers. At the end, the survey redirects the user to the AIGA Design Leaders Confidence Index. Turns out, design leaders have been rather un-confident since the last quarter: October 2007 was an all-time low (86.66 out of 100) since AIGA started the index in April 2005.
First, I started thinking about how bad the January 2008 numbers would be when they’re finally posted (approximately February 1), and what my threshold would be before I started considering a different career. Then, I remembered my ‘naive’ question when I first joined a women’s investment club in 2000 (right before the last recession): doesn’t a recession only happen because everyone panics, and if everyone remained calm, wouldn’t the recession be avoided? Then, I had a great idea for an analogy between the markets and the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, but someone beat me to it: the Hitchhiker’s Guide to Markets.