Uncertainty

A lot of people and companies sitting on billions of dollars of cash and being in a position to start hiring workers again - i.e., "create jobs" - say they can't do so just yet . . . because of all the "uncertainty" in the economy.

What? Isn't uncertainty a given factor in business?  Uncertainty plays a role in just about every business decision.  When Henry Ford started his namesake company and began producing cars for a mass market at a time when automobiles were mostly for rich people, there must have been some uncertainty as to how it would work out.  When Bill Gates started  a software company envisioning a personal computer in every household at a time when when the Internet was only for military applications, there must have been uncertainty there.  No matter how confident Henry Ford or Bill Gates was, there must have been someone around saying to either one of them, "I'm not sure you're going to make it." 

Success in business, to quote a redundant Billy Joel lyric, is not automatically a certain guarantee.  There's always a huge risk that a business will fail, and the statistics favor failure.  In fact, some of the biggest failures in business were caused by the attitude that there was no way a venture could fail.  John DeLorean was confident in his dream of making his own cars.  Remember Wang Computers?  Now you can forget it.

How about failed products made by successful companies? Again, consider cars and computers. Someone must have been overconfident that IBM's PCjr. would be a hit.  Henry Ford II, grandson of the original Henry, was certain that the Edsel would be a success back in 1958.  And, in the case of a hit the younger Ford thought would be a miss, he had given up an opportunity to take over the Volkswagen factory in Wolfsburg a decade earlier, for free; his top executive, Ernest Breech, said the plant was "not worth a damn."  Ironically, uncertainty played a role in Ford's decline of the offer from the Allied forces occupying Germany, largely due to Cold War tensions and the fact that Wolfsburg was only five miles from the border with communist East Germany.

So, there's plenty of uncertainty in starting businesses and in expanding them with new products.  It seems to me that hiring more people to handle the products and services companies already provide would actually be less risky than either of those things.  

But try telling that to the shareholders.