Here’s why.

If you’re still employed and in business midway through 2009, you did something right in the past nine months.  You likely reduced your organization’s not-so-fixed overhead, eliminated nonessential and underperforming workers, froze salaries, cut budgets and expenditures, put growth on hold and hoarded cash.  It’s been about as unfun as business gets.

Congratulations, you made it.  Almost. 

It’s what you decide and what you do in the next three months that will either recalibrate your business for optimal economic recovery, or alternatively will write the first line of a cautionary tale.  Chapter One will be called “Leadership Failure.”  But this story can still have a happy ending.

To survive and arrive at Third Quarter 2009, successful C-levels already have embraced the idea that preserving their organization’s business model and brand are the principal obligation of the executive team.  You can be a compassionate leader all day long, but if there’s no money to cover payroll and pay bills, nothing else matters.  The organization goes dark, and popularity will earn you a spot in the unemployment line right behind a slew of managers and staff who hope their next boss has the courage to lead.

The captain goes down with the ship.  Well, put the snorkel down, because you’re not sinking anymore.  And guess what?  If you play the next 90 days correctly, you could actually end up the stuff of legends.

Here are five things organizational leaders should do right now.

1. Take a giant step backward.  It’s counterintuitive in every way, because this advice is about going forward.  Train your thoughts on the past, and rediscover the essential products and services that established your customer base and built your business.  Whether it was 100 years ago, 25 years ago or early last spring, recommit to what made you.  Identify your organization’s core offerings, document their value and post it on your office wall.  If it doesn’t fit on a single page, you don’t understand the homework.  For the next year, market and invest only in whatever appears on that piece of paper.

2. Don’t introduce anything.  You heard me.  For 12 months, plan new products and services to your heart’s content, but launch absolutely nothing outside of your core portfolio.  Doing so will divert the gazelle-like focus you need.  That doesn’t mean shrink your business.  It means grow, for now, only what you know.  There will be a time again for pioneering, but not in 2009.  Keep track of those great new concepts, though.  If ideas are truly great, they are sustainable; and will be great next year still.  Rather, put that money, time and energy behind the flagship.

3. Pour your resources into communications and marketing.  That means cut other budgets and beef that one up.  If you don’t successfully market your core products and services now; and in so doing, immediately engage every existing and prospective customer to buy from you, then what you spend anywhere else won’t matter.  Your server can take a patch; but your marketing cannot.  Invite your senior communications and marketing strategists to sit at the executive table, and for that matter, your agency principals too.  We are all up to the challenge.

4. Get your act together on social media.  This, from an old dog.  I attended fax machine training and marveled at how paper that went through there came out somewhere else.  Age or unfamiliarity is no excuse today for not having an organizational presence on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and the like.  And a strategy for organizing your online communities is a must.  That’s what the social media boot camps call them:  communities.  We used to call them customers.  If you don’t understand the power of the “tweet” and don’t have the first clue about social media planning, hire a PR firm or a consultant that does.  PR firms do more than issue press releases.  If not, you’re with the wrong one.

5. Start everything by thanking your current customers.  Every executive team held the same meeting in the past six months, more than once probably, during which company leaders examined areas to cut.  If you’re still doing business at any level, they didn’t cut you.  They remained loyal during a very difficult period, one that’s not over yet.  Even a reduction sent a positive message: Times are tough, but we value your contribution.  Communications and marketing strategists will advise on the best way to say thanks and, if they’re really smart, how to turn thanks into referrals.

When adults ask little kids what they want to be when they grow up, there’s one answer you never hear:  “An employer.”  If you’re at all like me, you never wanted to be anybody’s boss.  Yet if you excel at your profession, it becomes inevitable that you will ascend.  Although there are many perceived perks of leadership, the reality is few if any balance the intense pressure and expectation to always have the answers.

Doctors become heads of hospitals.  College professors become college presidents.  Lawyers become judges.  Line workers become CEOs.  In my 20 years, I’ve been fortunate to collaborate with many great organizational leaders.  The very best of them remember where they came from.  And know what they don’t know.

Not everybody is a great communicator.  Not everybody is a great marketer.  Today, more than ever, everyone needs to be.  As an executive, if it’s not your personal sweet spot, don’t let the next three months break you.  Team up.