Entrepreneurs are optimistic about themselves - even if the stats are against them

Forbes.com reports that CMOs are bullish on the U.S. economy. That’s the finding of a new survey by Duke University‘s Fuqua School of Business, out the other day.

"Optimists outweighed pessimists 8 to 1 in the survey of 269 U.S. CMOs. Since August, their overall optimism level rose 11 points, to 63.4 on a scale of 0-100.

- CMOs have strong confidence in the underlying customer dynamics central to any economic recovery,” said Christine Moorman, a marketing professor at Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business and the director of The CMO Survey in a statement. 

-They predict an increase in the number of customers entering markets, purchase volume and likelihood of buying a range of related offerings from companies. These figures paint a very positive view of the economic landscape.

Over the next year, CMOs surveyed expected to see 32.4% of their company sales coming from global markets. That’s up from 24.7% in August 2011 and 18.7% in August 2010.

Media budgets will continue to shift too: In the next 5 years, marketers expect to spend 19.5% of their budgets on social media, almost three times more than the current level of 7.4%."

To read more from the survey results, go to www.cmosurvey.org/results.

Are they right? Is the Us economy recovering, and lifting all of the other Western economies up from the mud? Should we throw a party? I´m not sure. Perhaps they are just sick of being pessimistic and sad after years of frowning. It´s human to want things to be better and to therefore also think it will be.

Consider this phenomenon:

The chances that a small business will survive for 5 years in the Us are about 35%. But the individuals who open such businesses do not believe that the statistics apply to them.

A survey found that American entrepreneurs tend to believe the average chance of success for “any business like yours” was 60% - almost double the true value. The bias was more glaring when people assessed the odds of their own venture. Fully 81% of the entrepreneurs put their personal odds of success at 7 out of 10 or higher, and 33% said their chance of failing was zero. (source: Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, fast and slow)

I guess the same applies for love, where people get married in spite of knowing that so many relationships will break... Who want to stop living just because of risks...

Of course we will not start a business or a marriage if we think it will fail in our attempts, but the optimism is a little worrying and at the same time inspiring. I´m happy there are entrepreneurs out there, risking everything to keep the system going. What if everyone was negative and scared – who would employ them? It´s the heroes who keep smiling and believing who puts food on the table for all of the others. It´s the crazy ones who change the world. Thank you! I will always do my best to help you sell and succeed.