Will a company focus on survival or growth during recession? Or does it think long term or short term? Would you spend time and resources on strategizing business plan or acquisitions or mergers or strengthening the ever weakening sales pipeline? Tricky, isn’t it? To get a better grip over these pertinent questions, let us go the greatest teacher of all – History.

McKinsey compares the patterns of the four previous recessions and comes up with an interesting chart. Please observe and read some of the revealing and not-so revealing patterns…

Great strategies depend on accurate assumptions and more so during recessions. You need to get a fair grip over the recovery pace of your industry and more importantly the timing of recovery. Any slip here will have disastrous effect on the short and long term. For example, pattern suggests that ‘Energy’ sector was a laggard in terms of recovery during all four recessions. Whereas pattern exhibits that healthcare was one of the recovery leaders in ‘73 and 80 recessions and played neutral during ’90 and 2001 downturns. Make your business assumptions based on such historical patterns and increase your winning probabilities.

We at DJargon heavily bet on the following three sectors to be the aggressive recovery leaders amongst others: 1. Information Technology 2. Telecommunications 3. Healthcare