The Long Game

The calendar invite arrives with no agenda and no attendees listed except you and your manager. By the time you notice the pattern in the building, it's already happening. Someone in finance started the spreadsheet three weeks ago.

That's how economic cycles land at the individual level, and they've been landing that way for decades: after the 2008 financial collapse, when the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy triggered a cascade through the global banking system and redundancies spread across every sector; after COVID froze entire industries overnight; in every contraction before and after those, when credit tightened and executives started talking about efficiency and HR calendars filled up. The conditions rotate. The mechanism stays the same: organizations under pressure cut costs, and cutting staff is the fastest lever they know how to pull.

What also stays the same is who survives it.

A book from 2008

In the year the GFC hit, a short book called *Bulletproof Your Job* appeared. Stephen Viscusi wrote it for people navigating a tight employment market, and he gave them four strategies. Simple ones.

I read it then. I've shared it since with graduates starting their first job, with experienced people in mid-career drift, with team members who were quietly about to be restructured. Thirty years of organizational life across multiple companies and countries, and the advice has never once felt dated.

The four strategies: be visible, be easy, be useful, be ready.

Most people ignore them until the no-agenda calendar invite lands.

Be visible

Visibility means making your contribution legible to the people who matter: your boss, your peers, your stakeholders. What are you working on, what have you delivered, how does it connect to what the organization actually needs. Consistently, and without blowing your own trumpet every second day.

Agile teams do this naturally: showcases, backlogs, working-out-loud practices that make work clear not just to management but to each other. That's career insurance as much as it's project methodology.

Working Out Loud, as a deliberate practice, takes it further. You share your thinking, your progress, your work in ways that invite collaboration and make your knowledge useful beyond your immediate team. You become someone others learn from, which registers differently than just completing tasks on time.

When a restructure lands and a manager asks who they can't afford to lose, the answer is almost never the person whose work was invisible.

Be easy

Being easy to work with means being dependable: following through, engaging honestly with problems, showing up without drama or defensiveness.

The opposite is being high-maintenance, and high-maintenance is expensive. If working with you generates friction, political fallout, or extra management overhead that someone else has to clean up, that cost starts to register when budgets get squeezed.

Ask yourself honestly: what's it like to work with me? Better to find out from a trusted colleague now than to discover it in a conversation you didn't see coming.

Be useful

Everyone thinks they're useful. That's the catch.

Ask your boss and your colleagues honestly: do they experience you as someone who makes things better? Who runs a workshop to solve a real problem? Who teaches something new, mentors someone, transfers a skill instead of just performing it?

And then there's the unprompted kind. Something outside your job description is broken, and you have the skills to fix it, so you do, without being asked. You nail it. That demonstrates capacity beyond your lane, which is exactly the signal that registers when leadership is deciding who's expandable.

Be ready

This is the one most people defer, because it requires effort before anything feels urgent.

Ready for opportunity means keeping your CV current, building transferable skills, staying connected to your industry and not just your current employer. Opportunities have a short window. They don't wait.

Ready for adversity is mostly about finances. Six months of expenses in savings, which financial planners recommend as the floor, not the target. Having that buffer changes the psychology of a redundancy entirely. Without it, you're making permanent decisions under temporary pressure, taking the first thing available because you can't afford to wait. With it, you can be deliberate.

Beyond the finances: have a backup plan. A specific one: who do you know, what skills transfer, what would you do next, how long can you sustain the gap? The people who land well after redundancies almost always had this worked out before they needed it.

The pattern underneath

Here's what I've observed across thirty years and more than one economic downturn.

The people who apply these four strategies when things are fine, when there's no restructure in sight, no headcount review, no whisper of a hiring freeze, those are the ones who don't panic when it does arrive. The visibility is already there. The reputation is already built. The financial runway exists.

The people who start thinking about this when the news turns bad are usually starting too late. You can't build visibility in a week. You can't develop a reputation for dependability in a month. You can't save six months of expenses when you're already losing your income.

These four strategies aren't crisis tools. They're habits. Viscusi framed them in a crisis context because that's when people finally stop to listen. But the strategies themselves are for ordinary time, the long quiet stretches between downturns where nothing feels urgent and preparation feels optional.

The unwritten rules at work haven't changed in thirty years. The economic conditions rotate. The technology shifts. The org charts get redrawn. The rules stay the same.

Start now, when you're ahead. That's the whole point.