I don’t participate in economic downturns. In the company I was running in 2008, one of my first acts at the beginning of the recession talk was to introduce a corporate resolution stating that we respectfully declined to take part in any recession.

Of course, that’s meaningless from an economic level. Our surrounding realities are our surrounding realities. In the words of Fred Armisten playing Joy Behar…. “So What? Who cares?

Well… The people around you… your troops… care. In any economic downturn that is talked about enough to reach meme level, the tendency to participate is strong. When these situations arise, the leaders of all companies have a choice of which direction to take. Unfortunately, many choose to participate by employing an insidious tactic. We regularly see this participational tactic in headline grabbing remarks by CEO’s.

Here are generic examples of common forms:

• “Economic Downturn Leads to 8.5% Drop in Sales”
• “Economic Pressures Result in 23% Decline in Stock Price”

During a recession or depression or whatever, it’s as though companies line up to offload all of their bad news as fast as possible. Sure, sometimes economic problems cause real problems for companies. However, the gusto with which some of these claims are made throws up red flags in my head. It’s simply too easy to trick people by intentionally confusing correlation with causation.

For a specific example, let’s look quickly at the U.S. auto industry. They have been making inferior products for years that lead to massive erosion of brand image. The problem was so bad that the brands continued to suffer despite improving quality. I can’t find the report at the moment, but a study was done before the recession with actual new models of cars. The experiment was simple: replace all of the emblems on each car with the emblems of another manufacturer and measure consumer responses. Long-story short, people preferred the U.S. brands with logos of Japanese automakers.

So along comes an economic downturn that hits credit markets especially hard. Automakers rely on credit to sell their product. On paper, anyone can see that yes, this is a problem for automakers. However, it is not the problem. In a flurry of PR, all of their previous sins were effectively forgiven to the point of the public barely batting an eye when they were compelled to contribute tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars to these companies because they were hapless victims of an economy.

In this example, the U.S. automakers have succeeded in shifting public opinion in their favor to a significant degree. They effectively leveraged confused economic seas in a way that absolved them from real scrutiny. They played the victim card and it worked.

Recessions typically serve as a healthy form of corporate Darwinism. Previously weak companies are pushed over the edge of cliffs they’ve been teetering on for years.

When evaluating reports of companies framing themselves as victims of a big, bad, mean world, think twice before accepting claims of causative relationships.

When leaders of small companies are quick to seek absolution from bad situations, question whether they might be the problem.