Work for a large public company? Bad luck!

This is nothing directly to do with the 50-plus market.

Two weeks ago McKinsey conducted a survey to judge the recession mood of companies and the actions they intended to take.

Not good news. Compared with one month earlier, twice as many executives expect their companies’ profit to fall in 2009, and more than half expect deflation in their countries in the first quarter.

Nearly 70% of respondents were experiencing falling profits and half expect profits to fall in 2009. The share of managers saying their companies are planning to decrease the size of their workforces in the near term had shot up from 35% to 44% in the past month.

Sorry that I cannot give you a link to the paper but it is subscription only.

What really interested me was the difference in the attitudes between managers in large public and small private companies.

As you can see from the chart – small private companies are taking a more positive approach to the recession than the mega public ones. I suppose that is not surprising since a lot of large public companies are in the finance, automobile and retail industries, where we all know that things are not perfect.

So don’t expect much innovative joy from the large quoted companies. It will be fast moving, smaller companies, that will take advantage of the economic mayhem. Some of these opportunities will involve refocusing on sub segments of the older market. Dick Stroud