With So Much Happening At Once, Here’s Where To Focus

The whipsaw of headlines rips ahead of markets’, pollsters’, and pundits’ ability to reckon with them.

This raises a question: what is

Here are the two monthly standards of consumer confidence and sentiment, The Conference Board‘s Consumer Confidence Index and the University of Michigan’s Consumer Sentiment benchmark. Both reflect declines during the past 36 month period, not only from a decade-long upward trajectory prior to the onset of COVID-19’s impacts in early 2020, but further deterioration, to levels lower than any readings since December 2011.

Whether consumer confidence lags or leads homebuying and housing activity has been subject for argument. Factors that typically impact sentiment – jobs, payment power, economic mobility – have at least a tinge of uncertainty around them in a shifting and heaving high-volatility marketplace where the single common denominator constant is a generational swelling of household-forming late 20s-through-early 40-year-olds and a growing share of 55-plus year-olds on the move to fuss-free, connected and amenitized community living.

Whether those common denominator constants get swayed by the course of turbulent events in ways that impact structural demand is a coin toss, and few strategists with deep experience expect profoundly disruptive or lasting effects.

So, leadership priorities center on consistency, and skill at unifying and aligning both team members and partners around a simple shared goal. Berkshire Hathaway ceo Warren Buffett and the company’s vice chairman Charlie Munger, right up to the latest letter to shareholders, remain a font of wisdom on how leaders can remain truly present amidst the fray of external disturbances and disruptions.

Buffett writes:

Teaching, like writing, has helped me develop and clarify my own thoughts. Charlie calls this phenomenon the orangutan effect: If you sit down with an orangutan and carefully explain to it one of your cherished ideas, you may leave behind a puzzled primate, but you will exit thinking more clearly.”

In another leadership gem – one whose timeliness amidst tumult and distraction offers a business true north – from this year’s letter Buffett talks in the first person to the second person “you,” a shareholder. Homebuilders and their residential real estate and construction partner business leaders might simply interpret the “you” in this case slightly more broadly, to include not just their shareholders, but homebuying and renting customers, localities, partner firms, and team members. Buffett writes:

I would like, however, to emphasize a further item that turns our jobs into fun and satisfaction –— working for you. There is nothing more rewarding to Charlie and I …”

For times like these, when headline risk comes a mile a minute, leadership presence around clarity and trust – the work builders stand for – can help weather the storm.

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