Well, the 1998 recession also affected me greatly, because it caused me to focus more directly on technology instead of business (besides the dotcoms closing their doors, many large corporations suddenly realized they did not need most of their management chains, so they gutted their middle managers and many of the first level managers. Together with having an HR instructor in an MBA program tell us that we needed to learn HTML because "this World Wide Web is going to change everything".

I would not ever have been in position to hear that advice or to actively change my direction if the earlier recession not spun me out of the orbit I was in.