If your job requires you to be responsible for the Quality of your organization as a whole and not just a product or six, then the current issue of Fortune has a pretty good checklist for you. In How to Manage your Business in a Recession, Geoff Colvin lists 10 things that people who run companies should be considering in order to weather the recession and a lot of them can be things you should also be looking at.

  • Reset priorities to face the new reality – Change hurts, but the economy is hurting, so you’d better change
  • Keep investing in the core – Products and People
  • Communicate like crazy, balancing realism and optimism – Silence makes people (investors, customers and especially employees) worry
  • Your customers face new problems, so give them new solutions – redefine value for your customers
  • Don’t rush to cut prices – really understand your price sensitivity and elasticity
  • Focus on capital — how you’re getting and where you’re using it – you must earn a return on capital that exceeds your capital’s cost
  • Reevaluate people — and steal some good ones – reward your best workers well and then steal your competitor’s best performers as well
  • Reexamine compensation — what is it offering incentives for? – encourage long-term thinking
  • Think twice about offshoring
  • Be smart about mergers and acquisitions – Even though this activity peaks when the markets do, things are cheaper now