If you are traveling without focus on your direction, you will eventually fall off a cliff.
People start really worrying about their eventual cliff drops (real or imagined) during a recession. All businesses will need to react to that perception change if they want to survive.
if you've got your "ducks in a row" which i guess is the PC version of "shit together"... then you'll always be prepared for whatever comes. it's when you're not prepared and have these glaring flaws in your organization that everything falls apart when cliffs are spotted :D
it takes a true complete meltdown to kill a business that's "properly" run. we can only dream of that kind of perfection, though. i personally feel that ad-driven businesses are afforded a little extra cushion in bumpy times because their revenue is not directly from the consumers. of course sufficiently mountainous bumps are still felt O_o
thanks for your input
of course it's a growth strategy. i would never suggest otherwise. but this IS the technology age. and i would even go out on a limb to suggest, if you're not growing and/or innovating, you're dying.
and that's doubly true when financial systems collapse