The world has changed. After years of benign economic conditions, the four horsemen of financial apocalypse – credit crunch, recession, volatility and uncertainty – are blazing a trail across the horizon.

Executives must now reassess their organisation’s agenda and communicate it clearly. If history is a guide, most will frame the current conditions as a threat and take action to protect what they have. Mitigating threats in tough markets is prudent, but companies that adopt a defensive position ignore a counter-intuitive truth: the worst of times for an economy as a whole can be the best of times for individual companies to create value.