General
Synopsis
Businesses are advised to look back at past successes and promise future achievements. This strategy helps divert attention from current financial struggles and supply chain issues. By invoking a golden age and announcing ambitious future plans, companies can reassure investors. The present is often overlooked in this approach. Business failure is presented as a chance to craft a compelling narrative.
Lads and ladies, especially peeps of commerce, let’s toast to No. 8 on the much-loved HETLoR – 2025 Honest ET List of Resolutions – the most bulletproof of all New Year resolutions: always hark back to the glorious past while simultaneously pitching a glorious future. That way, the present – this quarter, and probably the next many – is a swamp of losses, broken supply chains, and PowerPoint decks that look like crumpled Post-its in the bin.
Consider the genius of nostalgia. When your balance sheet resembles a standard north Indian railway station during the festival season, simply invoke a golden age, any golden age, the more distant the better. Instantly, shareholders are lulled into a warm bath of retro reassurance of mythological proportions. Then pivot – hard – into the future. Announce that by 2030, your company will colonise Mars, reinvent sambhar and monetise the concept of ‘vibes’. Investors adore a visionary who can lose money today but guarantee utopia tomorrow. The present, meanwhile, is treated like a suspicious relative at a wedding: acknowledged briefly, then ignored. This is the brilliance of the resolution – it’s a two-pronged strategy of temporal misdirection. Past glory, future grandeur, present irrelevance. So, as the champagne corks fly, remember: business failure is not a tragedy, it’s a narrative opportunity. Merry Christmas!
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