Short and long

"In the long run, we are all dead." This is the best-known quote of British economist John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946).

Keynes believed that self-correcting forces might bring a depressed economy back to full employment in the long run, but that the long run is "a misleading guide to current affairs". Governments need to give their economies a short-run kick-start.

(A macabre twist on Keynes's words occurred in Britain last year when, as Nobel-Prize winning economist Paul Krugman pointed out on his blog, people who had died couldn't be buried in the short run because of the credit crunch.)

Many firms are now struggling with the conflict between the short run and the long run. Hit by a significant fall in short-term revenues, they are trying to cut their costs.

The problem is how to do this without damaging longer-term prospects. Cutting marketing expenditure is relatively easy — hence the dramatic fall in spending on advertising — but this endangers brand image.

Training budgets are also easy targets. In the past two weeks, three managers in large German companies have told me that their foreign-language training is being pruned. Language-training organizatons report the same story from the other side of the fence.

In a (still) highly globalized world, this seems incredibly myopic and likely to reduce the ability of firms to compete in export markets, as this report suggests .

But faced with limited budgets, companies will increasingly expect employees to bring the relevant foreign-langauge skills with them. In-company training will be provided only after these questions have been answered carefully:

• Who exactly needs foreign-language skills?
• Which foreign languages do they need?
• What exactly do they need to do in these foreign languages?
• What level of language skills do they need?
• Will they benefit from language training?

Of course, these questions have been asked in the past. But they will be applied more rigourously in the future.

The message for employees is clear: if you want a job and want to progress in your career, you had better start investing in foreign languages — now.