Defying economic gravity: the Euro crisis has lessons for us all

Whatever your politics, you're probably pretty worried by the fiasco now developing in the Eurozone countries as the one-size-fits-all construct of the Euro starts to look more and more shaky by the day. At the outset, it looked like a rational and practical means to simplify trade between national neighbours, and was sold to the populations of Europe as just that: hey, you won't have to convert your currency when you go to Italy for a holiday, what's not to like?

Increasingly, it's becoming clear that having a single currency across multiple sovereign states, each with quite different econonmic circumstances, is probably unsustainable, at least without some radical pooling of financial and political power at the centre - and that means Eurozone countries handing authority over their economic levers to Brussels, and by turn, to the most powerful Euro nations, Germany, and to some extent, France. And given the poor track record of the EU in respecting local demoncracies, it's no wonder that large swathes of the European populace are getting a bit panicked: they're on board an out-of-control train piloted by an unnaccountable political elite, determined to use the crisis as cover for irreversible political and fiscal union - and that train looks like it's heading for a tremdous crash. We can all see it, but our European leaders appear unable to.

In my view, it's not that they cannot figure out what the problem is, but that they are terrified of admitting it. Suddenly the emperor would have no clothes. Suddenly, the vanity and ambition that has kept the federal European project levitating in defiance of economic gravity is starting to dissipate in the face of reality: in particular the reality of Angela Merkel standing her ground, unwilling to allow German taxpayers to write blank cheques to support the less sober Euro economies. Yet still Manuel Baroso claims that the Euro crisis is nothing to do with Europe, but is all the fault of the Americans.

It might be stretching a point a bit, but the willful blindness of Eurozone leaders to the simple economic truths about their project do remind me a lot of the situation companies sometimes get themselves into with projects and initiatives of relative equal size and grandeur. As the Global Corporate Transformation project (for example) gathers momentum, staff, prestige and budget, everyone's a fan. It almost beccomes a corporate cult, and the compexity, cost and effort can get out of control. It takes a lot of courage to point out that it's not delivering genuine, practical business benefit. It's easier to let the thing meander aimlessly on, in the belief that it might soon turn the corner and show some positive results - easier than chopping back the plans and agendas of senior people with a lot of 'skin in the game'.

Even at the level of individual salespeople, it's terribly easy to believe too much in your pipeline, populated by lists of 'very interested' prospects........harder to see that our natural optimism and (over) confidence in our abilities is blinding us to the reality - the wrong strategy, the wrong pitch, the wrong propsects.

The sales equivalent of 'keeping the Pound' might be then to rigorously defend your self-reliance, expect no-one (not even the Marketing department) to come up with the leads, and constantly test the resilience of your forecast by examining the real metrics - your actual conversion rates, for example, and have the courage to change tack, even at the cost of some wasted effort and a short-term knock to your reputation.

Maybe sometimes, we all have to be like Greece - default, leave the Euro and face the consequences: short-term pain and turmoil is surely better than endless suffering?