Be alive to opportunities, CBI boss says

2009 will be a year for strong business leadership, Richard Lambert, the director-general of the CBI has said in his new year message.

Mr Lambert said although the challenges posed by the recession were “obvious” there were opportunities for companies.

“Economic conditions have deteriorated so rapidly in the past few months that many businesses have had a struggle just to keep up with what’s been going on,” said Mr Lambert.

“For some, the short term battle for survival will now be all that matters. But for most business leaders, there will be important choices to be made in the months ahead, between the need to conserve resources over the short term and the opportunity to build up a stronger position to benefit from the recovery when it comes.”

Mr Lambert said he had visited a number of companies in recent weeks that had chosen to cut back their output in the face of falling demand, but had retained their labour force and taken the opportunity to step up their training and development programmes to capitalise when the economy recovered.

He said: “Businesses are also going to have to deal with a broader set of stakeholders in the year ahead. Across the developed world, the credit crunch has driven governments to intervene much more directly in the way the economy works, and the UK is no exception.

“Our Government has already acquired a significant shareholding in the banking sector, and is likely to go further in the coming months as its uses taxpayers’ money to get credit flowing around the economy once more.
 
“So business leaders are going to need a clear agenda for how best to work with these new political relationships. And they are also going to have to develop an exit strategy in order to get the private sector back in control of its own destiny when normal times return.”
 
Mr Lambert added that businesses would also have to build new relationships with regulators, and not just those in the financial sector.

“A painful recession is going to test public support for the market economy, and for robust competition policies,” he said.

“Rather than indulging in public punch ups in these more testing times, regulators and companies of all kinds will do better to work together to develop evidence-based analysis and pro-growth regulatory policies.”