I went to hear Tom Peters the other day. He's a great speaker, but I have to say I was disappointed. Here we are facing the most extraordinary business challenges of a generation, and his message was more of the same. It's all still true, but I don't think it gave people fresh or powerful insights about what to do.

I know there are some people who've declared that they're not going to participate in this particular recession. Those people are either lucky or delusional. There are a few businesses that have not been affected, and fewer still who won't be affected at some point.

A couple of months ago I wrote about the Stockdale paradox, the ability to face the brutal facts and still have faith we will prevail. Here's the brutal fact: there is no reason to think that we are in the hour before the dawn - you know, the darkest one. In fact, I suspect we haven't even got to midnight yet. I have heard lots of people saying there are lots of opportunities in a recession, but I never get much sense of what they are. I think that's dangerous. The Peters seminar was billed as giving answers to that challenge. I'd have to say it was entertaining but superficial. I worry that people might have gone away thinking that if they send handwritten postcards to customers and listening to their staff and customers more, then they'll be OK.

Let me be clear. I don't think enough businesses have gone beyond the superficial response of cutting costs. I don't think people are taking the long view. I'm not talking here about Big Visions, but simply beyond the next 12 months. This recession and its consequences is going to be with us for the next 3-5 years, and we need to think about how we're gong to not only stick around but to prosper over that kind of timeframe. Something this big doesn't get fixed overnight, and I don't sense anything on the horizon that's going to see a sudden uptick. Low economic growth is likely to be with us for some time. Forget last year, and forget the last decade.  It was an aberration.  The future is going to look a lot like every other decade except the 2000s.  Folks, welcome to the new normal.

And welcome to your defining moment. The biggest opportunity you've got is that most people don't get how serious and fundamental this is. They keep hoping it will be over by Christmas, just like Stockdale's colleagues in the Vietnam POW camp. As a consequence they are not re-thinking their competitive positioning because they don't think they have to, or hope they won't have to.  Sadly, hope is not a strategy.

The big opportunity in this recession is to take market share off incumbents who respond too slowly to the change in the market's requirements - incumbents who keep pumping out the same stuff when the customer wants greater value.

I don't like these blogs to get too long, and I'm very conscious that this one is long on threats and short on opportunities. I'm putting on a free seminar in May called "The Only Way Out Is Up: Make The Most Of The Recession" (click here for details). I'm doing this because in talking and working with many business owners over the last few months, I'm convinced that we simply have to grow our way through these turbulent times.

We need to invest quality time in ourselves, our people and our proposition.  And if we do that, we will succeed where others fail. We have to rethink our competitive positioning. Our focus has to be on two things: winning market share by being a better value proposition than our competitors (ie more in tune with the customer's new requirements), and getting obsessed about that old fashioned thing called productivity so that we can deliver better value at a lower or the same price without sacrificing margin.

Doing these things successfully will NOT see revenue grow over last year's. There are no miracles or magic wands. But you will grow your capability, and that's what will deliver growth and profit in the outyears.  Thos who re-position will be the winners of the future.  Those who don't re-position will struggle at best, and fail at worst.

Mike Ashby