Page 192 - Accelerating out of the Great Recession
P. 192
APPENDIX A
ABOUT OUR
METHODOLOGY
AND SOURCES
Starting with the premise that the past is an effective tool for
understanding the present, we set out to learn the lessons of
past economic slowdowns. The strategies highlighted in
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 were selected as a result of a comprehen-
sive historical analysis of company performance in past reces-
sions and periods of slow economic growth. First of all, we
identified companies that had outperformed their peers in
times of economic difficulty; we then researched how and why
they succeeded.
In order to develop our list of companies that performed rel-
atively well in downturns, we looked at what happened during
three previous periods of sustained poor economic performance:
the Great Depression in the United States, the era of “stagfla-
tion” in the United States during the 1970s and 1980s, and
Japan’s Lost Decade of the 1990s and early 2000s. We were
■ 171 ■
