A second once-in-a-lifetime economic downturn is underway when it might seem like the last one just ended.
What became known as the Great Recession of the 2000s was officially over in June 2009, a year and a half after the economy had started contracting. It was the longest of the post-World War II recessions. The unemployment rate peaked in Minnesota in 2010.
It was more like a five-year downturn for 90-year-old Scherer Bros. Lumber Co. in Brooklyn Park.
Had he and his colleagues in this family business not managed to survive that, CEO Pete Scherer said last week, they wouldn't be as confident as they are as the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds.
"We consider from 2007 to 2012 our on-the-ground MBA," Scherer said. "We learned more through those negative times that we could benefit from than anybody could have taught us … out of a book. A lot of that was forced upon us. At the present time we feel pretty good about having held on to some of those lessons."
It's an interesting idea, that a terrible downturn that caused so much pain for so many people still taught leaders how to get through the hardest of hard times, and what they had to do to build and maintain a resilient organization. The extraordinary and swift actions of the Federal Reserve in responding to the current crisis, for example, seem unlikely to have happened without the experience of Fed leaders back in 2008 and 2009.
One hope is that a lot of business managers also came out of that period holding tight to their own costly education in resiliency.
Three conversations with Scherer over the course of a week provided a little window into how managers were responding to the changing environment due to the COVID-19 pandemic.